design

Re-Make, Re-Model, Revisited

August 6, 2010

It’s been a little more than a year since I last updated the appearance of the blog. It was beginning to feel cramped and claustrophobic, so I went for the look you see here. The gray background is gone, the outer and inner borders have been removed, and the text column has been widened. I [...]

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Rock That Font (Slight Return)

June 12, 2010
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After writing yesterday’s post about the remarkable Rock That Font blog, I sent them a one-sentence email: “Submitted for your approval, my homage to your remarkable blog,” along with the link. Less than ten hours later I had a reply from Shawn O’Keefe, one of the founders, asking if he could publish my Joy Division [...]

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Rock That Font

June 11, 2010
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A friend and reader of this blog sent me this email about a month ago: About the typography of rock album covers: http://rockthatfont.com/ I have never seen a website that seems more precisely designed for [you] — except that there are no recipes, alas. A visit to the site confirmed his description; it was as [...]

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Best. Client Bribe. Ever.

March 31, 2010
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A Good Client thanks you for quality work done on time or ahead of schedule. A Great Client thanks you for the work you’ve done with a gift, what my friends in the biz call “client bribes.” I’ve received some fine bribes in my freelancing career: chocolates, bottles of wine, port, or scotch (a 12-year-old [...]

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Multitasker, or Multiple Unitasker?

November 17, 2009
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Alton Brown’s conversion of a fire extinguisher into a smoothie maker got me thinking about unitasking devices in my own kitchen. (A digression: The fire extinguisher in that demo is a CO2 model, which is hardly ever sold for kitchen use. Kitchen extinguishers are usually dry chemical models, which I don’t recommend for smoothies unless [...]

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Information is Beautiful

November 11, 2009
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One of my secondary careers — book designer and typographer — began with a commission to design this book. Before the project started, the author gave me a copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte, telling me that he wanted me to emulate the book’s production values, editing, and clarity of [...]

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Irving Penn, 1917-2009

October 8, 2009
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Photographer Irving Penn died yesterday. Anyone with even a passing interest in modern American design is familiar with his work. He transformed fashion photography from overcrowded set pieces to minimalist abstracts that focused on the clothes and the models themselves. The photo above – one of his most well-known – is of Lisa Fonssagrives, who [...]

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Mahlon Hoagland: 1921-2009

September 25, 2009
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He worked with James Watson and Francis Crick. He discovered transfer RNA and amino acid activation. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. His name was Mahlon Hoagland, he passed away last week, and you have never heard of him. I had never heard of him until a series of unlikely circumstances brought us [...]

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Tools of the Trade

July 7, 2009
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I‘m a web designer, but every now and then my print background bleeds through. I’ll find myself telling a client “Let’s push that left margin over two more picas,” or “I think we can indent the paragraphs two ems.” I can’t help it, it’s how I learned to think about composing a page. When Aldus [...]

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Re-Make, Re-Model

June 30, 2009

As mentioned here previously, this blog is in need of a theme appearance overhaul. What you see now is the scaffolding for the construction of a new design, based on the Thesis theme (see the link at the bottom of the page). I’m making changes already; the first order of business was restoring of Belm [...]

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