nemoorange.com

We've moved to a new location!

I’ve decided to close up shop at nemoorange.com and start a-new at desandro.com. Now that I am pursuing a career as a web designer, I needed a website that best reflected my abilities. While I stand behind the work first published on this site (well, most of it), the overall mass of content grew to be too large and too diverse to be managed properly. A blank canvas allowed me to stretch some new abilities and take things in a new direction.

Also, nemoorange.com is a silly, silly URL.

When I first started the site, I wanted everything to be in the same place. But now I see the benefits of diversification. Flickr is the best place for photos. Delicious is the best place for links. These sites offer more robust tools and options for organizing and viewing the content. Best of all, all that content lives segregated from the other stuff, so you can view and follow it at your own discretion.

Moving forward, desandro.com will be the new source for my articles and fun-time designs. I’ve built the back end to be flexible enough to accomodate a variety of content formats, so expect to see posts similar to the new moon project. I’m also maintaining dropshado.ws, my graphic design blog geared towards new designers just like me.

But I’m not going to scrap this site entirely. As embarrassing as some of the content might become, I’ve chosen to let it live on in a dormant state. I still have friends and family that visit the photo section for the sake of nostalgia. And I think I’ll continue updating the word list. Who knows, I might eventually use the URL for something completely new. But don’t hold your breath.

nemoorange.com August 2006-January 2009.

skullduggery : n. — Crafty deception or trickery or an instance of it.

scintilla : n. — a minute particle; spark; trace

ebullient : adj. — 1. overflowing with fervor, enthusiasm, or excitement; high-spirited. 2. bubbling up like a boiling liquid.

intaglio : n. — incised carving, as opposed to carving in relief.

Jefferson Memorial

slake : v. — to cool or refresh

Farewell 2008

Year end wrap up.

Circles and squares on canvas

The canvas tag discovered. I make more shapes and patterns.

Slumdog Millionaire

Fully Flared Intro from K05T0N on Vimeo.

via WE WILL BE OKAY

Reimagining Digital Numbers

Experimenting with geometic forms.

NPR: Northern Va. Tries New Model To Battle Sprawl

I have so many mixed up feelings about Tyson’s Corner. Living within 5 miles of the area, part of me wants to think a part of it as my home. The rest of me considers the area exactly what’s wrong with capitalism. Just one gigantic strip mall with not one tree for acres and acres.

inculcate : v. — to implant by repeated statement or admonition; teach persistently and earnestly

Aarc Pattern with jQuery

Make your own semi-circle squiggly design thingy.

Wavey CSS Pattern

Another HTML/CSS experiment. If I had another couple days, this would all be in jQuery.

Please no more Gotham

The above image was taken from The Outbreak, a choose-your-own-adventure online game about zombies. But this post is not about Flash or gaming or how I selected nearly every wrong choice before finishing the game. Instead, let me tell you about the moment I realized I had seen enough of Gotham.

In case you were asleep in 2008, Gotham is one of the latest fonts by Hoefler and Frere-Jones. It gained tremendous popularity being the font-of-choice of the Obama campaign. Like Obama, the nation (or the nation of designers at least) has been captivated with Gotham. I’ve seen it on trains and buses, in books and magazines, in commercials and informational diagrams. I’ve seen it everywhere. And I’m tired of it.

Of course, I am excited that we graphic designers have a new sans-serif that can be added to the super-exclusive club of Great Typefaces That Will Always Work — squeezing right in between Futura and Helvetica. But that doesn’t mean I should be used in every situation imaginable. For example, in a survival-horror game.

Oh, is that Gotham? Hey, 2008 called and it wants its font back.

Maybe that 2008 is coming to a close, Gotham’s use will reach saturation-point. But for the time being, can we all agree to hold off on employing H&J’s #1 font, at least for 2009?

Street with a view: On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…

via lau

Textpattern Refresh

This story begins several weeks ago, when I created my first plugin for Textpattern. The plugin enables the user to override the default stylesheet and instead use a custom stylesheet for the Txp admin, similar to hpw_admincss. Before I release it, I’m building up some custom styles that can be used in conjunction with the plugin. In creating these stylesheets, I foolishly saved-over the main CSS for this site. I basically flushed away all that work I did 7 months ago. The funny part is that I actually committed this act of mindlessness twice, the first time working on dropshado.ws. While I was frustrated that I made such a stupid mistake, I took the loss as an opportunity to clean things up.

nemoorange.com has been running on the same Textpattern installation since I first registered the domain back in July 06. Since then, my collection of styles, forms, and pages had grown numerous. In constantly tweaking and revising the site, I created more and more code snippets to make it work. For example, the (now-defunct) daily photo section used 7 different article forms, 2 page templates, and 40 lines of CSS. On top of that, all those forms and styles were developed a bit recklessly, back when I was just beginning as a web designer. Since it was all put together piece-meal, the code was getting ugly. Everything worked separately, but as a whole it was incoherent . My goal during the last revision was to clean all of that up, but I only addressed the CSS. If I really wanted to make this site all bright and shiny, all the elements—the forms, styles, pages, and how they interfaced—would haved to be inspected.

Going through the Txp installation allowed me to work some new web-designer muscle groups. When I made revisions in the past, it was directly to the live site. This is a bad practice, and is not a valid option in the professional field. This time around, I started by creating a new sub-domain with a fresh Txp install for the maintenance mode. I copied the database over so everything would match. But as a matter of happenstance, I soon discovered MAMP —a development environment for my Mac, so my local computer would act as the server. My thanks go out to Jonathan Stubbs, for putting together a terrific walkthrough of getting Txp running locally. As a web designer, this meant one basic thing: I didn’t have to worry about bandwidth or waiting for page refreshs. Before I started eliminated the cruft, I backed up all the forms, pages, and styles with hcg_templates. Now that all the furniture was moved out of the house, I could start knocking out walls and get to re-construction.

Cleaning house

First order of business was to delete anything that wasn’t being used. Old page templates and article forms and custom styles all got the ax. With the crud out of the way, everything had to be re-built. Surprisingly, putting it all back together was relatively easy. I was overhauling everything, so I didn’t have to worry about making sure something old would fit into the new scheme.

I first implemented YUI Reset CSS to start stylin’ tabula rasa. I then created my own grid CSS based off of Nathan Smith’s awesome 960 grid system. Mine’s 920 pixels wide, separated into four columns. Yes, the previous version employed the same grid-based layout as well, but now I have all the styles for that grid separated nice and neat. If you pull up a view source, you’ll see lots of classes of col1 and col2. After that, the workflow was fairly haphazzard, jumping from form to page template to CSS.

To you, the difference between the design two weeks ago and today should be barely noticeable. My aim was not to put a new skin on the design, but work with the skeleton itself. I basically employed all the good practices I’ve learned in the past six months. The result is a much cleaner site, with less clunky forms, a significally smaller CSS file. I also separated some of the special CSS for certain sections into their own files.

Now that I identify myself as a web designer, it’s integral to my professional livelihood that I have something that reflects my talent. The previous version—while it did work just fine—was a rat’s nest if you looked under the hood (I apologize for mixing metaphors). Now this site is something I can be proud of. All the same, it will be interesting to see how I will feel about that six months down the road.

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