Shorts

“Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (Demo)”
Bob Dylan
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

~ via sincesheleft

“You get better at what you do”

—

Cutting That Cord, John Gruber.

Rather obvious, but something we tend to forget when the going gets tough.

The kind of stuff I wake up to on a Friday morning.

Portal 2: Lab Rat ~

A two part comic series set in the Portal universe, explaining what happened between games one and two.

HackemUp—Diff for Hacker News ~

Fooling around with Hacker News seems to be a lot of people’s favourite way to kill time. If you spend a reasonable amount of time on HN in a day, you need this. It shows you how the front page has changed since the last time you were on it (needs you to leave the page open, of course).

~~I hope this turns into a userscript, since clicking a bookmarklet everytime is so ‘05~~Not any more.

Monday, 11th April, '11

The Mantia Effect

I got linked to this great repository of wallpapers, but what caught my attention was the “Mantia” logo at the top. Click around on a few swatches and see how it changes. Or if you’re lazy, here’s a more obvious version.

Here’s the image he uses for the navigation bar:

There’s some creative transparency at play here. And then using absolute positioning, overlays it on top of the featured wallpaper, while the markup keeps its logical hierarchy. Clean markup, clean CSS.

Very clever.

References

Mantia
Mantia’s Blog—Some interesting things scattered around.

¹

I’ve always thought of coming up with a way of having text that is a sort of mask over the background image; all in the grand scheme of context specific design. Of course, this should be a part of CSS, but I don’t think we will get it any time soon.

On the other hand, this is a clean way of getting that done for logotypes. Don’t be surprised if you see this used in any of my future projects. ↩

How To Get A Real Education ~

By experience, and going out and doing things. This follows hot on the heels of Wozniak saying the same thing a few days ago, about grading students based on projects rather than standardised tests.

(Source: curvedwhite)

Let The Fear Out ~

I am sure there are people who don’t care for everything I post on this site, but I am not writing for them. I write for myself. […]

Not everyone who reads this site will enjoy this specific post, but if I had let fear stop me from even writing it, both me and the people who do enjoy it would be losing out.

Justin Williams gets it.

~ Via Ian Hines

“When people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.”

—

How To Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon.

~ via marco

(Source: marco)

The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.~

Always important to keep in mind, and not just for Ph.D. students.

~ via rashmiswamy

~ by necronomic

Thursday, 7th April, '11

Shorts v.3: Light & Dark

At least, I think this is the third iteration of the design. I thought I would be able to settle with Gotham and Helvetica. I mean, seriously, it’s Helvetica! But the previous look was too cluttered. Changing and tweaking things around I got caught up in adding useless little things that were neither functional nor pleasing.

So I started from scratch, and tried my best not to change the Tumblr sample template code, keeping all the customisations to the CSS. I tried to keep things instinctual, rather than think too much about them. I think this goes back to bringing the focus to the text. No fancy typefaces or flashy colours either. Just serif. Beautiful, simple serif.

The idea for the short bio on the right was something I borrowed from Cameron Moll’s tumblog. I tried to keep it light so that reading it a thousand times wouldn’t get on people’s nerves. I might add some more things to the “bio-bar” in the future, but it seems perfect for now. However, I couldn’t leave things that simple.

Day & Night

I have two themes for the different phases of the day. At night—or what I hope is night for you—it changes to light on dark mode, and during the day the opposite. It’s a little gimmicky, sure, but it was the easiest way to get the best of both worlds. The light mode is really easy on the eyes, with subtle highlights in the right places. The dark mode is a little interesting.

Without going into the differences in rendering between Windows and Macs, the rendering for light-on-dark text on this side of the fence is a lot denser. Bold light-on-dark text is a massacre. So I had to change all the bold weights to normal. The contrast is lower as well, but I’m sure nobody who might be bothered by things like that will actually be interested in what I put up here.

I like this. It’s comfortable and easy and makes me want to write again. That’s always a good thing.

The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design ~

The context, meaning and tone of web copy should always determine typographic style. Reading the text in full—or at least understanding what the text might be before styling it—is a pre-requisite. A common mistake is to allow the design to dominate the text: Design for design’s sake, or even worse, fashion’s sake. The text is made subservient to the canvas that the designer wished to paint on the screen.

—Jon Tan.

A really old piece, but I see something new every time I read it.

Wednesday, 6th April, '11

Bad Voice Triennium

In the 11th grade, I sang a duet as part of Red House’s entry for the school’s annual Western Music Competition. We sang a cover of Almost Here, and it didn’t go so well. Particularly the pre-chorus bits. If you hear the song, you’ll understand why.

I think 17-19 are the worst years voice-wise. But it’s especially worse for singers. I’ve been singing since I was 8 or 9 years old, and I always knew I had a good voice. But I’ll admit to questioning my ability to sing during those three years. Notes I could easily hit a year ago would seem far out of reach, and I had resigned to singing easy songs that were far from “wow” worthy, lest I try too hard and mess up¹.

Unfortunately, those years are pretty high up on the curve of when you meet new people. Going off to college, meeting bands at concerts, stuff like that. Having an unstable voice meant I wasn’t taken too seriously by musicians, and I used to restrict others in the bands I was a part of. You never want to do that.

But it feels good to be on this side of vocal-puberty, where you know how much you can exert and how high you can go. Now being in a band is more about getting along with the people and less about my singing—that takes care of itself.

Although I did perform a version of “Stairway To Heaven” during that time, which people in school still associate to me. ↩