Archive for 2009

There is no fold. Viva la scroll!

I hate camera straps. But LumaLoop looks like it could be the savior of my camera-carrying woes.

The ABCs of Branding is a sweet poster that’s “…foil stamped and embossed to create an alphabet composed of letters from many of the more famous (and some infamous) logos of all time”.

I also saw photos of an amazing art installation made entirely of large quantities of salt.

The incomporable Jason Santa Maria has officially launched his own studio, Mighty. Congrats!

Parliment Design has one of the most beautiful studio interiors I’ve seen. With lots of detailed photos about the process of creating it. (via)

Art in my coffee gets a fresh new design by Meagan Fisher (co-curated by Meagan and Jina Bolton). Foamy awesomeness, indeed.

idsgn’s holiday gift guide suggests some pretty neat things, including our own Ampersandwich tee.

My favorite iPhone game (and my son’s) is new and improved and now free. Grab Ramp Champ if you haven’t already.

The Raphaël JavaScript library does some interesting vector drawing stuff. The chart demos are particularly cool.

A newly-produced Muppets version of Bohemian Rhapsody? Yes, it’s real (and quite awesome). (via)

There are many reasons to love Pictory, a new photo magazine from Laura Brunow Miner and Jeff Croft. Editorally-driven submissions from photographers and storytellers around the world, beautifully executed.

I also stumbled upon Instant Chewbacca, which will likely come in handy at some point. (via)

Now available at the shop.

Delicious typography. A super-soft, “Tri-Blend” t-shirt in espresso brown from American Apparel, printed with everyone’s favorite logogram (set in Knockout‘s Ultra Sumo weight). Peanut butter? Mustard? Fluff? Jelly? Either way, we think the ampersand is a ligature for eat and not et.

The Ampersandwich Tee is available now over at the shop. For fine typography aficionados such as yourself.

A nice tutorial on creating your own textured backgrounds from two stock images by Ali Felski (who’s site is beautifully textured in its own right).

Ligature, Loop & Stem, “creators and curators of fine typography-related products”, has launched. Ingenious site layout and presentation, and some wonderful ampersand-related products are already for sale.

Microsoft announced an early look at IE9 for developers. Notable stuff includes support for the border-radius property. No vendor-specific extension. Good reason to include actual CSS3 properties along with vendor-specific ones today. Also mentioned is support for more CSS3 selectors. I’ll be more excited if there’s word on text-shadow, box-shadow, RGBA and transforms.

The FontFont library is now availble on Typekit. This is quite huge news. It also looks like the available fonts have been optimized for web use. Bar: raised.

Typekit, “… a subscription-based service for linking to high-quality Open Type fonts”, is now live and available to all.

A superb desktop wallpaper by Alex Cornell. Loving the subtle text and texture of this one. Looks nice on the iPhone as well. (via ISO50)

Birdhouse for Your Soul is a touching post by Greg Knauss on why he loves the internet. Absolutely worth a read. (via)

Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Flyin’ has a new iPhone app out that boasts, “… 1,000 Minipops on your iPhone/iPod touch which you can look at whenever and wherever you want.” Minipops are blocky, pixel art renderings of famous people.

Authentic Jobs is having a No Retweet Necessary Contest with some pretty excellent prizes, some of which were hand-selected by partner sites (we chose a Nintendo DS Lite).

I also saw donut seeds for the first time. (via)

Ten years ago, two of my biggest fears were: flying and public speaking. I’ve done enough of both (usually combined) over the last several years to where I’m now OK with either. At times even comfortable with it. I’ll probably always get nervous right before a talk — but the anxiety has shifted from, “crap, how am I going to get through this” to, “I want this to be good. I don’t want to let anyone down”.

With that confession out of the way, the next year is filling up with some great events, and I thought I’d list them here:

• Future of Web Design NYC — November 17th, 2009. I’ll be talking about “Progressive Enrichment with CSS3“. (Get 15% off the conference pass with promo code SPEAKER)
• Carson Workshops presents Handcrafted CSS — November 23rd, 2009. Join Ethan Marcotte and I in London, as we present our book in a unique, one day event. Space is limited! (Get 15% off the workshop ticket price using promo code CWDC)
• An Event Apart Seattle — April 5-7, 2010. I’ll also be splitting a full-day seminar with Jeremy Keith after the conference proper. I’ll cover CSS3, while Mr. Keith covers all things HTML5. It will be most excellent.

Ethan and I are also looking for other unique cities to bring the Handcrafted CSS event to. Have an idea, or know of an event that needs a full-day course that covers CSS3, fluid grids, bulletproof design and more? We’d love to hear about it (in the comments on this post).

Mule Design’s newest t-shirt, the El Vetica, which boasts “… celebrating the career of Mexico’s only typographer/luchador”. Purchased.

Mr. Eaves, a new sans-serif companion to Mrs. Eaves from type designer Zuzana Licko. The “Q” is especially excellent.

Chromeography, a photoblog entirely devoted to “… praise of the chrome logos and lettering affixed to vintage automobiles and electric appliances”. From Typographica.

I also saw this photo of Jenne Farm in Vermont, which pretty much sums up how beautiful Fall is in New England.

Well, after 6+ years on an ancient and highly customized install of Movable Type 3.15, and 4+ years on various homegrown CMS solutions, I’ve finally upgraded the guts of this site. I chose WordPress. Sure, there are several other excellent options out there to power the blogs of 2010 and beyond, but the familarity of WP, its plugins, pricetag and other factors all fed into the decision. Plus, I told Matt in the halls of SWSW in 2003 that I’d try his little weblog project. I’m finally following through on that.

Exporting thousands of entries isn’t fun. But luckily plenty of folks have done this before. Overall, I’m feeling spolied by the little things that have been commonplace for you folks that are smart about upgrading your blogging engine more often than I. With the Notebook sections ported over, I wanted to launch things and tweak as I have time. That said, there are still parts of the site that still need migrating help (namely, the Work section). Eventually all will be under one roof.

Along with the backend switch, I made a few minor visual tweaks to the site as well (hence the title of this post, “WoodPress”). Nothing terribly exciting. If anything, it’s a slight step backward, to the layouts of SimpleBits’ past. Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.

Then again, history teaches us that it probably won’t happen. But at least now I can’t blame the software.

Oh, and there’s a new feed now (although the old feed URLs should redirect if my .htaccess is up to snuff).

I’m pleased to announce the super excellent folks at Carsonified are bringing the Handcrafted CSS workshop to London! Carson Workshops will be presenting Ethan Marcotte and myself in a reprise of the one-day course we organized last month here in Salem, MA. And it’s surely going to be a blast.

Just like last time, each attendee will get a copy of the book (Video Edition including the DVD) and we’ll spend the day walking through much of its content and more. This event was a great success here in New England, and we’re thrilled to bring it to the UK. Thanks to Carson Workshops for making this happen!

So join us on November 23rd at Wallspace St Pancras in London. For more info on the event and to book a place (there’s a max of 70 spots), visit the Carson Workshops site.