When I feel a slight irk in things, I try to find out what the problem is. I mean, there usually is a problem when I feel an irk. I evaluate the problem, think about it a lot, think about a possible solution and then play with ways of solving it. I’ve noticed how improving things in a playful manner pays off a lot more than just “regular” improvement; for my personal satisfaction, it does.
An example. I didn’t like writing. With pen or pencil or whatever. Just plain writing. I just didn’t like it. It was a mess to read and I just couldn’t see myself in it: to put it simply, I hated it. I knew what the problem was. I hadn’t practised writing for myself for quite a while. Best I had were some notes on my desk. I knew that I had to change things, so I looked at the letter shapes the next time I was jotting down things in class. I tried to give them all a consistent size. I gave my ascenders serifs. I added ligatures (I’m a typophile) and special letter combinations and I had lots of fun doing that. You may consider that nerdy, but it was fun. A good two weeks of practice, most of it in class, had made my handwriting pretty neat. I am actually proud of it. I now write a lot, because it’s a heck of a lot of fun to write things that simply look so nice!
There is now an image of it that I drew, then photographed myself!
There is a point in this?
There is a point in this indeed. If something isn’t right, work on it. If solving it doesn’t work as well as you had hoped, try and make it fun. What I did was finally putting my typophile heart in it. I made sure I was working towards something that would be fun to look at, and above all, I made sure I liked to do it. What works for me could work for you.
One thing, though, that still bothers me about my handwriting: my numerals. Anyone has tips regarding numerals in handwriting?
Many of you (or at least many Mac users among you) will be familiar with the Coconut Flavour apps by Chris Sinai (donate some money, it’s for the good of the apps). Of his hand comes coconutBattery, one of the best battery guard dogs I’ve seen. When I was checking his site, I noticed that coconutIdentityCard didn’t have a nice icon, so I offered him my skills. Out rolled my first application icon for OS X.
Am I reading this correctly? A redesign you say?
Yes, it was about time! My previous design was of late 2004, and my style in both coding and designing has changed vastly. Next item to redesign will be this very site, but that will take a while. For now, let’s talk about the portfolio.
First of all, take a thorough yet elegant look at my portfolio (if it sends you to the blog, clear your cache please). Not only is it now one page, it’s also big tasty chunks simpler. It’s blue with red. It’s got tiny screenshots and previews. I prefer it like this. I think the overview is handy. It shows quite quickly who I’ve worked with, what my style is and what kind of work it involved. Take one Steve P. Sharpe who didn’t even know I designed Flidget until I showed him my work in progress screenshot. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but at least now there’s a real overview. Check it out. It has some work that never, until now, was featured anywhere.
I divided the page into four columns in my head, and even though they’re not obvious, the grid system did help me a lot getting the alignments nice without having to worry about column widths. They’re all equal. I got rid of a lot of markup and made some common items a tad more generic. It degrades better than the previous design. Did I say I prefer it like this?
Funny sign of the times, though, it feels like this is the first redesign of 2006 (or the past six months, really) without any AJAX or Web 2.0 stuff in it (or well, maybe there is; depends on your definition of the terms. Bah). The reasoning is simple: I didn’t need it. That would seem like a very sensible standpoint, but for some reason, few think about that when designing something. “Ohmygosh this looks cool” didn’t get my preference over “this works”. Sign of my times.
First of all, season’s greetings to all of you! I’ve been spending my time eating, playing the guitar and drinking special beers, generally. One way to spend Christmas. I hope you’re all having a great time, but now:
Our feature film
Referred to as one of those crazy plans I keep thinking up, people said I was mad, or to be more precise, we were mad. I guess that yes, indeed, we’re out of our fucking minds. For the sake of listening to great music and to have something to do this Christmas holiday, Geert and I have planned our first (annual?) music marathon. Over thirty albums, a whopping 26 hours of music and all that in one long breath. We’re sacrificing not only two Earth days of our holiday, but also our sleeping pattern for at least a week, I’m afraid.
The Fletcher Memorial Music Marathon, as we christened it (funny—we’ll not be listening to The Final Cut), will be held on the 27th and 28th of December and will, well, yeah, in fact it will span these two days. Damn. We’re out of our minds.
The line-up
To make sure we’ll not be spending our entire holiday listening to brilliant music (hey, what the– why not? ;)), we’ve decided to pick one album per artist. That’s tough, yes. Consider Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Bright Eyes, Sufjan Stevens, Nick Cave, Moby– yup, tough decisions all the time. The general rules also include “No soundtracks” (with the notable exception being Superfly, which we can’t consider a soundtrack because it’s a brilliant album on itself) and “No best-of albums”, so that rules out the two 2-disc Best of The Beatles boxes, and that makes it more the challenge for us.
The albums we’ll be listening to
| # |
Album title |
Artist |
| 1 |
Unrest |
Erlend Øye |
| 2 |
Seven and Six |
Bellwether |
| 3 |
Let Love In |
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds |
| 4 |
Automatic for the People |
R.E.M. |
| 5 |
Superfly |
Curtis Mayfield |
| 6 |
3 |
Blood, Sweat and Tears |
| 7 |
Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars |
Fatboy Slim |
| 8 |
Gods and Monsters |
I Am Kloot |
| 9 |
Sleeping with Ghosts |
Placebo |
| 10 |
Carpathia, A Dramatic Poem |
The Vision Bleak |
| 11 |
Ghost Reveries |
Opeth |
| 12 |
Mutter |
Rammstein |
| 13 |
A Certain Trigger |
Maxïmo Park |
| 14 |
Turn on the Bright Lights |
Interpol |
| 15 |
Melody A.M. |
Röyksopp |
| 16 |
Debut |
Björk |
| 17 |
Play |
Moby |
| 18 |
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness |
The Smashing Pumpkins |
| 19 |
Funeral |
The Arcade Fire |
| 20 |
Twin Cinema |
The New Pornographers |
| 21 |
Picaresque |
The Decemberists |
| 22 |
The Madcap Laughs |
Syd Barrett |
| 23 |
Riot on an Empty Street |
Kings of Convenience |
| 24 |
I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning |
Bright Eyes |
| 25 |
Left and Leaving |
The Weakerthans |
| 26 |
Illinois |
Sufjan Stevens |
| 27 |
Give Up |
The Postal Service |
| 28 |
Cosmo’s Factory |
Creedence Clearwater Revival |
| 29 |
Bad |
Michael Jackson |
| 30 |
Revolver |
The Beatles |
| 31 |
The Dark Side of the Moon |
Pink Floyd |
(Yes, I started at the bottom. Yes, I got lazy. I still urge you to buy all the music we’re gonna be listening to, as it’s all worth your whiles.)
Next year, we’ll double the amount of music and do something for charity. Insanity for Charity© ;)
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