Colophon explains how everything is made, where’s, why’s, and how’s.
This is the back rooms of the site. Some rando code or style rules may 'no-clip' into unknown walls, respect the box model. The tools, the stack, the influences, and a few recent changes. Even though the site itself is more than two decades old, it really does tend to evolve in spurts, but let’s see how things go!
How It’s Made
Handmade, in the literal sense: hypertext markup language, cascading style sheets, and a sprinkle of those Personal Home Page (PHP) files. Every one of these pages is a plain text file I typed.
Stack: HTML, CSS, and PHP 8.5. No JavaScript, no frameworks, no build step. What I write is what ships.
Images: resized and cropped on demand by Kirby, cached as files. No image CDN.
Goals: semantic markup, accessibility-at-my-best, simple URLs, and simple style rules.
Hosting: shared hosting on the same boring server in Europe for the last twenty-something years.
Private Eyes
This site is private in the old-fashioned sense. No cookies, tracking scripts, analytics tags, no behavioral advertising pixels. I may look at logs when something breaks, but I’m also busy pursuing my non-tech goals. Right?
History
For more than twenty years, this has been a placeholder, a blog, a design archive, a music art design cubby, a place I avoided putting work, and now, intentionally, a small art gallery with a design studio attached to the back.
The ongoing repair log lives in the changelog, where changes are written down with a ton more ceremony than they probably deserve (and codenames, of course).
Design
My current visual direction is somewhere between a small gallery, a museum wall, a studio filing cabinet, and whatever happens when those things are filtered through my particular brain.
The Museum Design System I’ve been calling it, is the collection of type, color, spacing, shadows, highlights, and grid settings, and carries special styles for plaques that are close to the wall, objects that extend out from the wall, a three color spot light system, a background color mesh system, and a blurred background photo system, all with custom settings per page. All set in the control panel on my machine in the studio.
Footprint
This website used to have a lot of weight. This version 7 has better code that has made it more accessible, lean, and much faster for people to browse. This took a bit of time in between the more important life tasks and responsibilities but it’s been worth it! It’s worth looking at the carbon score for this site now as it’s gone from a miserably embarrassing F to a solid A! Win!
Baselines & Grid
I am working on a page about the redesign of the site and it has a bunch about the page grid. It will show here when it’s published.
License & Credits
My own words, my photographs, and my artwork are published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. In plain speech:
share it freely
credit me
don't sell it
don't alter it
Quoting a paragraph to argue with me is great idea and encouraged, actually.
But I think the code is a different matter, help yourself. I don’t think code is like prose very much. Code is strict and formulaic, natural language is free-flowing and rule-breaking… sometimes.
Every method for writing code here was learned by reading somebody else's markup in a View Source window, or learning from a book or sample code written by others. Take the CSS, the markup, take the ideas. No credit needed at all, although I'd love to see what you build. Please let me know!
Everyone else's
Photographs are mine unless a otherwise noted.
But plenty of what appears in posts is not mine at all: album sleeves, magazine spreads, book pages, packaging, product shots, and objects I use. Every effort is made to link to creators and designers where possible. Those are reproduced here to talk about them, how they were designed, what the type is doing, why a layout works or doesn't. That is my commentary, criticism, and education, and I consider it fair use. Nothing here is sold, licensed, or monetized, no advertising runs against it, and none of it is offered under the license above, because those rights were never mine to give.
No sponsorships on this site and no affiliate links.
If something of yours is here and you would rather it weren't, send me a note and it comes down. No argument, no forms.
Nothing on this site is set in a webfont. The words you are reading right now are in whatever your own device calls its system typeface: San Francisco on a Mac, Segoe on Windows, Roboto on Android. So no fonts are downloaded, it renders instantly, and it already looks correct on your screen because the smart people.
Think of these fonts as placeholders. The plan is to set this place in a face of my own drawing.
There is so much great software written by creative designers and coders. I primarily discovered MacPaint in high school and my brain expanded large enough to let Mac software fill a large room in the brain.
It’s not 'cosmically' great, but it’s really great.
Mac-based coding environment with extensions and the ability to write, share, and install extensions from others.
Do you write code on a Mac? I think you’d like it.
Okay, yeah, **it IS cosmically great**.
Limited edition version of the stylish semi-hollow-body electric from Gretsch.
It feels like both an acoustic and an electric in nearly equal measure. Wild, with a WHAMMY BAR. Custom tuned by the guitar tech that services Stray Cats & Brian Setzer and his band. Who knew it was a local guy right down the street from me!
Version 6 of this site ran and leaned on LoRes for at least …what, 6 years now?
Designed by Zuzana Licko, a truly inspired type designer and artist.
A dot matrix of pixels or blocks to represent ideas as abstract letterforms, very low-res, and very satisfying (yet a challenge to read!), I think it worked well.
Dang I had fun with these fonts.
A lot of the site’s thinking comes from old personal websites, early design communities, artist archives, museum labels, printed matter, record sleeves, book indexes, and always looking for more.
Millions of bloggers
Type
Human Ingenuity
Date
∞
The only way I learned to write code, was from browsing the personal sites of other designers and developers.
If it wasn’t for the true creativity of others, for the blog posts where techniques were not just shared but debated over, and the knowledge and wisdom that others have shared, that has fueled my own passion to write styles and markup, I wouldn’t be here today, and I love that others and myself love making art on the internet.
Thank you all.
Presumably surfers wanted to surf when the tide was horrible, so empty pools brought them landward.
Skateboarding pools started to boost the skateboard scene and larger and wider pool decks were born. The scene became an industry, and amateur and professional artists and designers took to the medium easily and created a rich history.
Of course, snowboarding, skiing, action sports, and even video games got into the mix. 720 was a fantastic arcade game.
My art and design teachers
Type
Human Ingenuity & Kindness
Date
Since the '70s.
Teachers and professors have always been a real boost to my own artistic self-confidence.
For example, some of my favorite classes in school were art and design history classes, spinning the tales of people inspired long ago to create and make a living creating.
Sometimes I wish I were in art school full time.
Site Powered By
The world, it runs on energy. What makes the energy? I think it makes itself.
Coffee
Type
fuel
Date
Always
Love coffee.
I mean, it’s everything.
Lego
Type
artifacts
Date
Don't know! They're old!
I mean, it’s Lego, right?
I somehow still have Lego bricks from my childhood. None of the siblings wanted them. That was a long time ago, when bricks were made from Mesopotamian potash and river mud.
Since visiting Paris in the 2000s, and sitting down by myself at an espresso bar courtyard for an espresso and seeing the coffee biscuit like this? Yeah, life changing.
Everyday I can, really. Totally indulgent.
Praise
Type
Ethereal ephemera
Date
Time immemorial
Praise is powerful. High, low, mediocre? I’ll take it.
But I love criticism, too, eh? So load it on. Something not look right? There’s a reason: I didn’t see it or it’s sandboxy. Bring it. I can handle it.
Switched the software source of a few apps to hombrew, then added them with authors and links to the colophon page.
v7.4.20MetricRulesNEW
Created a stanadard measuring tape for each shop item and artwork, shared measurements, etc., for easy editing. Phew.
v7.4.19EraserHeadNEW
Yes, it’s 1:30am. There is so much to change, fix, and clean up. I suppose that’s the advantage of interent over print design.
v7.4.18GazeUponNEW
Artwork & Product logic revamp. Spacing, colors, buttons, shop logic, another pass on page data so pages are complete, updated which artwork is canonical vs product, new directory for people places for crediting art and collabs.
v7.4.17NovaSiNEW
Taco Tuesday happened. Added some spice to the php files so they’re representing the actual engine objects and such. Helps for detecing errors. Nova v14 is out! Kirby patch.
v7.4.16ChiselTipNEW
Hello rewritten and simplified. semantics pass, filenames for images updated, artwork descriptions updated.
Design footer is now American Black Walnut and Canadian Hard Maple. This is tops. zzzzzz
v7.4.15CamelCaseNEW
Updated the boring Colophon stats and text. No computer on the plinth yet. Might have to find a contractor to get a power outlet located. No fire extinguisher either, actually!
v7.4.14PowdercoatedPlinth
Footer now has lobby plinth. Needs an old computer for searching the gallery/site, tho, right? Turtles…
v7.4.13GuestStars
My Letters now look like letters;
the new guestbook is up with billions of starrrs;
old teaser replaced by two teasers.
Thanks for Visiting
Thanks for making it all the way through the back rooms. Come back anytime.
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