“Web design is not merely building. It’s not just designing. It’s not only the rest of the myriad disciplines and titles we all align ourselves with, but the culmination of all these things.”

- Jason Santa Maria, A Real Web Design Application

Bobby McKenna:

One of the most consistent and admired illustrators on Dribbble, Mr. McKenna just graduated from Notre Dame and is apparently looking for a job. Something tells me finding one won’t be a problem.

A month into using Tumblr for the blog and portfolio here, and I’m still happy I made the move. Something that had been bothering me was the redirect that was required for the homepage. I couldn’t point simplebits.com at Tumblr completely. If I had, over 10 years of files and old archives would’ve vanished. Setting up a subdomain avoids that, but I wanted the blog to be the main index of the site. So redirecting simplebits.com to stream.simplebits.com was the best I could do. A ProxyPass redirect might’ve solved the problem for “masking” the index—but Tumblr doesn’t support that.

I came up with a rather low-tech and sloppy solution for getting rid of the redirect that I thought I’d share in case any of you are in a similar boat. It’s sloppy, but it works well. Many thanks @frogandcode for helping with the scripty-ness.

Here’s how it works: I’m now running a crontab every five minutes that curl’s stream.simplebits.com and saves the HTML source to a temporary file on simplebits.com. The script then copies the temporary file to simplebits.com/index.html (the copy was necessary as if the curl hangs for any reason, visitors won’t get a blank file). And that’s it. The HTML source from my index on Tumblr works like a charm so long as I ensure all the paths to images and other files are absolute.

The other benefit here is that the homepage is now a flat .html file. It’s pretty damn snappy. The downside is that there’s a possibility of a post not appearing for 5 minutes after it’s published (unless you’re viewing stream.simplebits.com). But I can live with that until I’m posting breaking news. 

An interview with Think Vitamin:

While I was in London for the Future of Web Design conference this past May, I had the pleasure of chatting with Keir Whitaker from Carsonified about Dribbble.

You can also find the audio over at Huffduffer if you happen to huff the duff stuff.

FontFonter:

This is a wonderful tool. Enter a URL and replace its fonts with any of FontFonts web fonts. Hmm, this site looks rather nice with FF Dagny and FF Meta Serif replacing Helvetica and Georgia.

8 Faces:

I just purchased a debut copy of Elliot Jay Stocks’ new print magazine that asks:

“If you could only use eight typefaces for the rest of your life, which would you choose? 8 Faces is a new magazine for devotees of typography that asks this question — and many more — to eight leading designers from the fields of web design, print design, illustration, and of course type design itself.”

Hurry though, only 1000 copies available.

“I found myself resorting to the same button styles, shading techniques, etc… and having to force myself to go back and change things up. I figured that if these guys can spend a year making a single piano, I could probably spend an extra couple hours here and there on refining these details.”

- Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain on his redesign of Steinway & Sons

Q & A with Jason Munn of the Small Stakes:

Grain Edit interviews the prolific music poster designer. Have long been a fan, and now purchasing the book, which collects over 150 of Munn’s poster designs for various indie bands.

Font metrics and vertical space in CSS:

Tim Brown from Typekit explains  the complexities of visible and invisible vertical space between characters when typesetting with CSS.

A hard copy of Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers arrived in the mail today. It’s wonderful to finally see how well-designed it is as a physical object. Most importantly, it’s the clear explanation of a confusing subject that’s made this little book a must-read.

Super Mario on Violin

EPICWIN:

A genius concept for an iPhone app: to-do list meets RPG. For a procrastinator like myself, this just might be the ticket to checking things off.

The Unfathomable Octophant:

The latest hand-printed screenprint from Phineas X. Jones. We have this one framed in our dining room. Love the style, detail and craftsmanship.

Which loads faster?:

Compare two URLs to see which wins. (via @trentwalton)

Twenty-six Hundred:

A painting by Chris Bishop that I wish wasn’t sold. I demand prints.

Decided to simplify things and just start another Tumblr to handle the portfolio here. This enabled me to reuse the new theme with some slight tweaks, and begin my “different shade background for each section” thing. It’s far from comprehensive yet, as I still need to bring over some more of the old stuff.

It’s been interesting going through work that’s several years old. Much of it doesn’t exist anymore. Gone. Vanished. All that hard work, thinking, stressing… poof. It’s a nice reminder of what’s important, and the reality of the ever-evolving web. A lot of this junk is just temporary. 

“We ought to praise vendors for using prefixes, and indeed encourage them to continue. Beyond that, I hold that prefixes should become a central part of the CSS standardization process. I do this not for the love of repetition, but out of a desire to see CSS evolve consistently. I believe that prefixes can actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS.”

- Eric Meyer on Prefix or Posthack

Current status at the office today, the Friday before a long holiday weekend. And admittedly a test of a Tumblr video upload.

Louis Harboe has recreated 11 iOS icons using nothing but CSS. Incredibly impressive.

Like many others before me, I’ve moved the weblog portion of SimpleBits over here to Tumblr. I did this for many reasons. I like that there’s one f!@#$ing template. That’s it. I don’t miss comments. I don’t mind that archives aren’t styled the same way as the main theme. I’m actually excited about the subtle social aspects of Tumblr.

I don’t have time to customize another CMS. I used to love having the time to customize a CMS only to find a better one and customize that. I’m aiming for efficiency now. I enjoyed designing this theme. I don’t like that simplebits.com is a redirect to stream.simplebits.com.

I have 10 years of archives. I had fun adding responsiveness to this design. I need to reskin the shop. I need to add static pages for speaking and about sections. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with the portfolio. If I waited till everything was perfect I would’ve never launched this thing. I’m now ok with doing things in stages. I think the most important thing in all of this is that I’ll be able to post quickly, easily, with less effort.

I’m looking forward to telling you more once I finish the book I’ve been writing for the past few months.