Wednesday, September 30, 2009
For the first time in two years my job feels like a real job. I leave the house in the morning, and at the end of the day I come home. My day hours are focused on being at work, and doing work. And when I come home, home is a haven, a place for housework and family and rest. Anyone who has made this transition before will tell you that working at home is not as dreamy as once thought. I can attest to this. Working at home is hard. The line between work and home is always blurry. Coffee shops never helped me.
For two weeks now I’ve been working in an office on Frankfort Avenue with good friend Paul Disney. The simple difference of having a place to go to to do work is enormous, the benefits incalculable. I’m very thankful for this and I highly recommend it.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Perhaps the most important thing we can do to a printed block of justified type is found in section 9.4.1 of Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. (The good graphic designer will tote this as his bible if he does not have it memorized.) It’s a simple rule:
Good justification is calculated paragraph by paragraph instead of line by line. And the best computer justification now relies on microscopic adjustments to the space between and within the letters as well as the space between the words. In this book, for example, the justification engine has been permitted to vary the intercharacter spacing by ±3% and to adjust the width of individual glyphs by ±2%. The bulk of the work is still done by adjusting the spaces between words, but there are more letters than spaces in these lines. Tiny adjustments to spaces within and between the letters therefore go a long way toward creating a page of even color and texture.
“A page of even color and texture” is what we’re after here, which …
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Dan Phillips on architecture:
You can’t defy the laws of physics or building codes, but beyond that, the possibilities are endless.”
He’s quoted about his work in a NYT article, One Man’s Trash. He builds homes for low-income folks using “mismatched bricks, shards of ceramic tiles, shattered mirrors, bottle butts, wine corks, old DVDs and even bones from nearby cattle yards” and other discarded scrap. (I wish there was a web design equivalent. Is there?) His work is beautiful.
Photo: Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Thursday, September 03, 2009
For my first job interview out of school I printed out websites I had designed to show the interviewer. They were printed on glossy inkjet paper. Actually, I had several websites I was going to print out, but the printer kept jamming and it was taking forever, so I ended up frustratingly printing only one or two and apologizing.
For some reason I was thinking about that, how bizarre it was that I was printing out websites to demonstrate that I could make websites. It seems in hindsight ridiculous, and I can’t think of where the idea came from.
I have this newer idea, though, that if you’re going to present a website to a client it’s a good idea to set the computer in front of them and get out of the way. Let them navigate. Let them feel their way around. Don’t enlarge the thing on a big screen, and especially don’t print it out. Let them experience it as they would naturally. “Feel” is so important on the web. And there’s only one way to get that. Take hold the mouse.
Somehow I got that job. Most of the work I ended up doing was print.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
This week sees the release of a new website for Paper Brigade. I worked on it with Matt Rubin directly, whom I’m excited to be working with again on the internet. It’s a simple site, and it came out well. And it’s built on the newest version of Textpattern.
