I created this poster for my Typography final project. It uses the Bree typeface and was created with Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop CS4. The poster size measures 24×36 inches.

The package label reads:
The vision of this project was to express the feeling of being so deeply captivated by design that you can’t help but stare, only to soon find yourself in complete awe with drool dribbling down your chin. The concept behind ‘Drool Over Design’ is to emotionally connect with the viewer to make them feel and appreciate the particular emotions that only great design can evoke. This crafted artwork expresses
love for design using plenty of drool, grungy textures, and gorgeous typography.

“Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke emotional response.”   -April Greiman.

The typography assignment was to “Create an upper- and lowercase 27th letter of the western alphabet or the next letterform of a non-western alphabet. Use Illustrator. Create a name for the letter‚ a place in the alphabet‚ and a new sound for it.” The letterform I created encompasses a ‘pl’ sound. I drew inspiration from combining the two letters, p & l, and tried to create a letterform that blended well with the rest of the alphabet.

View the PDF

What I thought was going to be an effortless upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 turned into a 4 day ordeal with lots of head scratching and google searching. Turns out I nuked the partition table to my /home partition and destroyed all metadata contained within in less than 30 seconds.

The Problem

How did it happen? Well it all started after I successfully did a fresh install of the latest release of Ubuntu, Intrepid Ibex. I avoided formatting my /home partition during the install because I have it contained on a separate partition, which was in ext2 format. I did some research and discovered that ext3 provides journaling vs non-journaling in ext2. So I figured I would convert my home partition to ext3, which can be done by issuing the following command:

tune2fs -j /dev/hdaX

Unfortunately, I stumbled across an option in gparted. The option was to “Format to ext3″. I blindly made a few clicks and began formatting my home partition…. wait… what? Did I read that correctly? “Format”??? OH SHIT! Cancel! Cancel! Cancel!

Less than 30 seconds had passed before I actually realized that the partition was being formatted (erased). Upon mounting the drive, it appeared empty but I knew all my data was still on the drive.

How do I fix this? Well there are two options, extract all the data from the drive or fix the partition table. The partition contains most of my design files, including websites, Photoshop & Illustrator files, and a number of other files I probably would like to have backed up. Thankfully all my music, movies, and photos are on a second hard drive.

The Solution

I used Photorec to extract files based on filetype. I managed to get over 500,000 files, which were dumped into 1,041 folders. Photorec is intuitive and rather easy to use. The problem I have with Photorec is that you cannot search for a specific filetype that is not on the predefined list.

Upon further googleing, I came across Scalpel. Scalpel does pretty much the same thing as Photorec but enables the user to add filetypes to search for, given that your filetype entry meets specific criteria. The config file is located at /etc/scalpel/scalpel.conf to which you can add filetypes. The filetypes need headers and footers to search for, which can be found using a hex editor.
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