Published by

aaronzlewis.com

Another personal site well worth checking out:

aaronzlewis.com

There’s a lot of great stuff going on here: a cocoon for fledgling writing that’s maybe not quite ready for prime time yet but well worth sharing, web-like behavior in that the site pulls in content from various sources (Twitter, Arena, his blog, etc.). It really gives you a well-rounded picture of his personality.

The use of color and transitions is great too, usually when I see a site with this much movement and color it can come across as wacky / zany. That’s fine and appropriate for some personalities, but it’s not the sort of thing that I would go for on my own site. So it’s cool to see someone accomplish a friendly, colorful, and playful design without it feeling too over the top.

I like the tone of his writing too, particularly the “mentors, collaborators, & co-conspirators” bit on his Credits page. I’ve wanted to add something like this for a while but haven’t been sure how to present it.

It’s interesting, coming across sites like this makes me go back and forth about where I’m going currently with my own. On the one hand I’m really enjoying making a site that others can use, it’s been great to see how people use it. On the other hand, I can only go so far with making the theme really “me”. There may be other ways to address this though… worth considering!

Published by

Decentering Whiteness in Design History, an annotated bibliography in progress

Check out Decentering Whiteness in Design History, an annotated bibliography in progress.

One of the great FemOS ladies shared the above resource recently. She came across it via the Simply Secure Slack chat. It seems like a strong doc, I hope that the researchers and others continue to add to it.

If you’re looking for resources on a particular topic like typography or graphic design, it’s best to refer to their hashtag list currently on page 8 (search the doc for “Hashtag Authority List” if it moves). Then find a tag you’re interested in and search the doc for that tag.

Below is a list of a few resources that caught my eye and I’d like to follow up on. These are all freely available online in one form or another or could likely be loaned from a library.

  • “The Font that Never Was: Linotype and the “Phonetic Chinese Alphabet” of 1921”, an article by Thomas S. Mullaney. The article is behind a paywall, but he also presented it at ATypI 2016 (see video).
  • Saki Mafundikwa’s TED talk Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets
  • Chromophobia by David Batchelor published in 2001. The editorial description: “The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through colour—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’—the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological—or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.” Purchase from the publisher, buy it secondhand, or look for it at local library.
  • “New Blackface: Neuland and Lithos as Stereotypography”, an essay by Rob Giampietro that was originally published in the journal of the Type Directors Club (an org that has been been in hot water over the past few months, incidentally…). It’s available to read on his website.
  • Design in California and Mexico 1915–1985, the catalogue for the exhibition “Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico 1915–1985” at LACMA in 2018. Purchase from the LACMA online store, buy it secondhand. Feel like this is unlikely to be in a local library unfortunately.
  • “Violence and Economic Growth: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870–1940” by Lisa Cook, published in the Journal of Economic Growth in June 2014. Cook analyzed over two million patents, cross-referencing with Census records to track Black patent activity over time. From the bibliography: “Her data suggested something huge happened after 1921 that caused the rate of Black patenting to tank after that date; it turned out to be the destruction of “Black Wall Street” during the Tulsa massacre.” Available in full as a PDF via Cook’s website.

Time to reintroduce a whole lot of color on this site, I think!

Published by

“All of time / Is right here / Is right now” 🌈

Current listening: “Mystic Familiar” by Dan Deacon

I listen to music while working but usually it’s something like Max Richter or Jon Hopkins, something without lyrics. I just can’t do lyrics and work on logic or systems, my brain gets mixed up.

This album is different, no problem working to it. And it’s so damn joyous, it’s the electro-pop mantra I need right now. See also the video for the first song from the album, “Become a Mountain”. And if you use Spotify, try setting up a Dan Deacon artist radio. Highly recommend it.

“Mystic Familiar” was released at the very end of January 2020, so at least one beautiful thing resulted from this unfathomably dark year. And my cousin getting engaged, and our dear friends telling us they’re having a baby. Continue connecting the dots between the good, feel lighter already.

Published by

Command to delete all `node_modules` directories

How to delete all node_modules directories from your computer

Sam just pointed out this article, so useful! I ran the command to check how much space my node_modules folders are taking up, it’s 6.2G in total. Probably more on my external drives. Not necessary for sites I haven’t touched in quite a while (particularly since I’m still trying to keep my old laptop kicking…).

Published by

Tom Hackshaw’s site

I had a lovely convo with NZ-based web worker Tom Hackshaw during a digital coffee a little while back, ended up sending him a link to Portfolio Starter once Sam and I finally wrapped it up. I had the good fortune of coming back across him recently when I accidentally sent an email to him instead of another Tom (oops! shows how mistakes can be good tho). Saw that he’s using Portfolio Starter, which is sweet! Better yet, he’s got an excellent blog going and a very commendable accessibility policy (I still need to get round to that…). Check his site out at the link below, or follow him on RSS.

tom.so

Published by

“A person is only a coder as much as you are an InDesign-er or Microsoft Word-er”

Jake Dow-Smith just announced Publish Something Online ↗, a resource geared towards students. It’s super worthwhile and a very fun browse. From the intro:

Building websites is often seen as an uncreative, mathematics-based task undertaken by coders. This library encourages you to learn how to design and build interactive experiences and to consider this a tool in your design toolkit. A person is only a coder as much as you are an InDesign-er or Microsoft Word-er.

This library will introduce you not just to code resources, but also to examples of alternative forms of screen-based interaction and the technologies they are based on.

Published by

A web color space that respects *real* lightness

Lea Verou just published a blog post about the LCH color space. This is super exciting, see her post for detail. Specifically, the improvement has to do with the perceptual uniformity and lightness being visually consistent no matter the hue.

The best way to get a feel for this is to experiment with her LCH color picker. Drag the hue value back and forth, and you’ll see that the tonality of the background remains consistent. It doesn’t suddenly feel a lot lighter in yellow than it does in blue. Do the same thing in an HSL color picker and you’ll feel the difference.

This would help a lot with the color on my site. I’ve never been 100% happy with how the color is handled because it is too hard to control the lightness and thus the legibility. See the List page for a clear example of this, posts in June and February are particularly hard to read. LCH would solve this!