Day: January 11, 2011
Places to Go: Summer Palace
One of the finest sights in Beijing without doubt is the Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), to the north-west of the city. Its extensive grounds and buildings served as a summer residence for the royal family especially during the reign and lifetime of Empress Dowager Cixi, although it had been a royal garden long before that. The palace consists of four major areas: court reception, residences, temples and extensive gardens. Three-quarters of the park are covered by water – the Kunming Lake. Quite special for the Summer Palace is its Long Corridor (Changlang) which runs for about 728m alongside the shore of the Kunming Lake and is richly decorated with paintings of mythical scenes. Throughout the centuries, the Summer Palace has faced several periods of destruction and restoration, and even now it is constantly under construction to preserve the rich cultural and historical relics that can be found here.
Behind the Scenes: Typewriter Fonts
It’s about time that I’d take you to the world of fonts. For a long time, I’ve been intrigued by fonts, collecting them on my computer (and yes, I’m aware that people say they slow things down). Still, I can’t help myself – I do love fonts, and it’s great how you can put them to use in digital scrapbooking. So, today I want to talk about typewriter fonts. Tons of different typewriter fonts are out there – a lot of them for free. You can use clean types, but I especially love the ones that look old, worn, ragged. In general, typewriter fonts will give your page a kind of vintage look. They also work great when you combine them with handwriting fonts. On top of that they make great word strips, even work as titles. Here’s just a quick glance at some of my pages I did recently where I used typewriter fonts (simply click on the image to enlarge): Now that you’ve seen all this inspiration, of course you want to know, …