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- Letting The Page ‘Breath’.
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I’m continuing my way through Robert Bringhurst’s book and at a slow pace. The Elements of Typographic Style is so rich with information that I can only read it in spurts of a few pages and often have to re-read to let the full lesson sink in. Lately, I’ve become very intrigued by how he describes rhythm in the text layout and the concept of how a page must ‘breath’.
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- It’s CSS Naked Day!
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Today’s the big day! I’ve turned off my style sheets in honor of CSS naked day! Aside from the sIFR, which I’m not going to disable for this, you are seeing the pure semantic HTML markup of this site. This ties into a series of posts I started earlier this week on semantic HTML. More to come soon
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- Typography Basics.
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Robert Bringhurst’s book “The Elements of Typographic Style” is an invaluable resource to any print or web designer currently practicing. I purchased this book a while back, and now sitting in the airport after SxSWi, I’ve finally gotten a chance to examine it in detail. Here are some important teachings I’ve gotten so far.
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- iPhone Notes: Kathy Sierra at SXSW
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At this year’s SXSW I didn’t feel like pulling out my laptop to take notes. Instead, I mastered the iPhone keyboard and jotted down some quick notes from the more interesting sessions. Here are my notes from Kathy Sierra’s excellent talk on helping your users kick ass.
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- Poplisher: The Beta Issue
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My good friend Mike Sullivan has just provided an invite to his new online publishing community Poplisher. Mike is a veteran in the publishing industry and is seeking to create a unique platform that merges online media with print media in interesting ways.
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- The “Best” Kind of Design Exposure!
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Yesterday I was greeted by fantastic news! Nick La has selected this site to be featured in the Best Web Gallery! Oh and did I mention that my traffic has shot through the roof!
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- What’s on Your Front Page?
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In the process of redesigning this blog I’ve been stuck on the homepage. What on Earth should I feature on the homepage? Who cares what I put on the homepage? Who is going to the homepage?
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- My blog up and down this week.
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If you went to my blog and noticed things were funny or that I’m missing a post you aren’t imagining things. Earlier this week my site got hijacked by some sort of spammer that installed a backdoor in my wordpress install. For a while you could see all of the files on my site including my configuration files tied to the database powering this blog. Bad news.
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- The Curious Shall Inherent the Earth.
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I really enjoyed the speech Jim Coudal gave along side Jason Fried of 37Signals at SXSW Interactive this year. Jim commented on the shift the creative community is taking. In the past the focus of our community has been to create and adopt standards. We needed to determine the best practices so we could perfect our craft. But now that all has been done. It’s always developing but for the most part we’ve accomplished a level of standards that allow us to apply our craft effectively.
What’s happening now is really exciting, creatives are realizing that after doing all of these per diem jobs we’ve gained enough experience and business knowledge to bypass the client completely and launch our own businesses. Entrepreneurship is the new focus of the creative community and that is a really exciting thing. Especially considering what’s already been done. Just look at flickr, del.icio.us, BaseCamp, Campaign Monitor, or BlinkSale.
The fact is it takes very little to start these types of business if you are the master of the craft. Marketing materials, identity design, and web development are EXPENSIVE. It’s a fact. If you are the resource that creates the external face of the company as well as the core product and functionality (in terms of a web based company and or service) you can create companies with almost no budget whatsoever. It’s really an exciting time. A lot of people are trying it out. Many of them will be unsuccessful. That’s how all business is. The sharpest minds in the industry will win; those who are curious shall inherent the Earth.
Listen to the Podcast from Jim and Jason at SXSW to gain some wisdom.