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.

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?

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.

Anyone who can drive below 25 MPH should be canonized

In these days of high gas prices and a failing economy, I’m trying out new methods to save a couple pennies. One of the best ways to save on gas is to simply drive slower. It makes sense—the less you accelerate, the less gas you use. The idea is to drive as if you don’t have any brakes—to stop slowly by losing momentum. Slamming on the brakes indicates unnecessary acceleration.

Since starting this practice, I’ve noticed a decent increase in my gas mileage. But the real story is in observation of my fellow commuters.

Once I started slowing down in traffic, I started seeing all this unnecessary acceleration. It’s amazing (in the negative sense). There has to be some underlying social regiment to simply move faster. I believe we have all been conditioned to drive at least 25 MPH at all times. This seems to be the magic boundary that every car should be . Think about it, how often do you see speed limits below 25 MPH?

What’s crazy is how drivers need to get to this speed no matter what. Accerating towards red lights, maintaining this speed with a stop sign ahead. Its rare to find a kindred slowsky like myself, coasting at 17 MPH towards the stop.

I myself am no stranger to this compulsion. Whenever I’m coasting below 25, I get this Jedi-esque sensory experience of the drivers behind me, fuming at the jerk in the blue car who’s taking his sweet time. I’ve witnessed people pass around me – in a race to beat me to the red light. I feel like I’m the crazy one for driving slowly and patiently and (as bonkers as it sounds) economically.

I hope that I’m just an “early adopter” to the new school of the slow—that more drivers will succumb to the you’ll-get-there-soon-enough mentality. But I’m lead to believe that we’ll all keep our lead-feet on the gas pedal. The impulse to get moving is just too great.

Finding the reins

Half-way through 2008 and two years after I originally registered nemoorange.com; It’s the perfect time for a State-of-the-Union address for this site. Personally, the past six months have been all about getting my life on track (not that it was ever off one). It’s about time I shared what’s been going on and what I see ahead.

New Moon and a new direction

The original intent of the new moon project was to re-acquaint myself with my creative side. In creating the entries, I re-discovered a part of my identity that I had neglected for far too long. Now that I’ve re-connected this piece, I have gained a whole new perspective on my life. I’ve found a purpose, an identity. Subsequently, I was able to set goals and take action towards a clear destination. I am going to be a designer. For the next year and a half, I’ll be going to school for graphic and web design. The goal is to be employed as a creative professional in one year.

This means that posting stuff to my website will have to take a back seat—although, now that I consider it, it’s probably just as important that I do put some content up. All the same, new moon entries will not come with every new phase the moon. So the bad news is that new entries to the new moon section are going to be less frequent and lighter in content. But the good news is that I’m on my way to happiness.

Blog

In the past two years, the blog has been especially under-developed. While I fantasize of typing passage after passage of fluent thought, the words have always been tough for me to put together. Putting together a sentence mostly feels like a game of Scrabble for me. I have the components set up on my little ledge, and I keep on mixing them around to see what works best. In shuffling around the key words and phrases, I stumble in expressing the original thought. For example, putting together this post took several revisions over the course of a week, flipping around sentences and paragraph structures.

Bread bag reins

Another obstacle in my writing has been finding a theme that would narrow the subjects to write about. Lately, I’ve felt mobilized to start getting everything organized. Simplified living is a bit hot-button topic these days. It coincides with the “going green” movement that’s become the story of the latter half of this decade. My aim is to write short—maybe 200 word—entries focused on the tips and methods to live simply and happily. Hopefully I can get into the habit of posting once a week. I’ll try not to sound too smug delivering what I think are tips. It’s more of a personal dialouge—how I continue to make sense of my universe.

Photo and Daily sections

The daily photo section has now been hidden away. It’s still available for you to peruse, but I hadn’t added a new entry to it since March. That month coincides when I started using Flickr seriously.

Since the beginning of my entry into blogging, my site has been primarily focused on posting up photos—typically of the previous weekend’s escapades. Nowadays, I’m less likely to bring the camera along for a night out. After all, how many pics of my friends at bars can one tolerate? Creating a photo post for this site requires several laborious steps. Instead, I’ve been spending more time devoting photo content to my Flickr account. With the Flickr Uploader, I can do the posts with just a couple drag-n-drops—very easy, plenty faster. Most important to you, Flickr is much easier to browse and search and discover and link my photography. Now that I’ve been using it for a couple months, I enjoy it more with each new submission. Eventually, the photo section might go away in favor of dedicating Flickr to all things photographic.

Now that I’ve declared this as a public commitment, hopefully I can stick to it. More content, different presentation.