Personal website of Tyler Sticka, including selected web design and interactive projects, articles and more.
Hello, RSS reader! 👋 This post has some bespoke art direction you’ll only see if you view it directly . No hard feelings if you prefer to read here, I just wanted you to know! ✌️ Historically, applying an outer stroke to text via CSS has been tricky. All major browsers have long supported these (stubbornly vendor-prefixed) properties: -webkit-text-stroke -webkit-text-stroke-color…
Hello, RSS reader! 👋 This post has some bespoke art direction you’ll only see if you view it directly . No hard feelings if you prefer to read here, I just wanted you to know! ✌️ In the mid-1990s, our elementary school class took on a big, multi-week project: The Mini City! For a portion of each school day, we acted out the administrative goings-on of a fictional little town. Each student chose…
While part of an agency, you’re always hoping to land that dream client: An organization aligned with your own interests and values, with stakeholders who support honest and open collaboration, engaged in challenging and inspiring work. When the The Type Founders worked with Cloud Four last year, it quickly became clear they were that sort of client. I was already an enormous fan of their…
It’s been 13 years, 2 months and 12 days since I joined Cloud Four . But today’s my last as its Creative Director and a full-time team member: I’ve decided it’s time for something new. Words can’t adequately express how grateful I am to have worked with such an amazing team ( teams plural counting all our esteemed alums) for so many wonderful clients , improving the web for millions of people…
Hello, RSS reader! 👋 This post has some bespoke art direction you’ll only see if you view it directly . No hard feelings if you prefer to read here, I just wanted you to know! ✌️ It seems Dark Horse Comics will close their “Things From Another World” retail stores by the end of June. For me, the Beaverton location is the greatest loss. Originally named Pegasus Books, it was founded by brothers…
In the spirit of seasonal home organizing , here are several dependency updates I’ve made to this site since my last refactor follow-up (most quite recently). Fonts After years of embedding my heading fonts via Adobe, I finally started licensing Freight Sans for self-hosting. I subset the fonts with Glyphhanger to reduce their size to about what they were before… though I bet I could get them even…
Hello, RSS reader! 👋 This post has some bespoke art direction you’ll only see if you view it directly . No hard feelings if you prefer to read here, I just wanted you to know! ✌️ Superhero fans have debated for decades which character has the most compelling cast of antagonists. Batman? Spider-Man? But in terms of sheer villainy, the average web experience in 2026 would send most costumed…
Since refactoring my site back in 2023 , authoring posts is pretty simple. But to make it even easier, I wrote a little helper script. When I run node tools/new from my project directory, the script… Greets me with some friendly kaomoji Asks for the post title Generates a URL/filename slug from said title, which I can tweak Checks out a Git branch (where necessary), using a name I can also tweak…
Hello, RSS reader! 👋 This post has some bespoke art direction you’ll only see if you view it directly . No hard feelings if you prefer to read here, I just wanted you to know! ✌️ When I fall in love with a piece of art or entertainment, I fall hard. I might recommend it to friends, look up behind-the-scenes details, write a review, draw some fan-art, maybe even send its creator(s) a nice note.…
I’ll cut to the chase: Our calendar is light, and we need more projects . Especially projects with a UX design , UI design or hybrid creative/development focus. Small projects? No prob, we’ve got individual high-velocity contributors to spare, ready to slot in at any project stage. Large projects? Bring it on: Our unique approach scales well to big problems, like modernizing legacy applications or…