No, you're not at the opticians. Lato (L), Calluna Sans(R).
I really like Lato. It was the typeface I used for headings on this site. That was until I fancied a change and discovered Calluna and Calluna Sans.
I prefer straightness of the leg on Calluna Sans' uppercase R, and the way the uppercase J drops below the baseline. The uppercase M nearly put me off: I usually prefer vertical stems to sloped, but the apex (in the middle) is cleaner than that belonging to Lato, and overall it appears less imposing.
I'm currently reading Just My Type by Simon Garfield. Buy it: it's very good and has some nice little nuggets, like this one:
We tend to treat the traditional and familiar as trustworthy. We are dubious of fonts that alert us to their difference, or fonts that seem to be trying too hard. We don't like being consciously sold things or paying for fancy design we don't need.
I've been pretty busy recently working on a new side-project: a nice bookmarking/scrapbooking tool, which gives me the chance to delve deeper into both server-side and front-end technologies. It's being built in Rails 3.1 and Backbone (with CoffeeScript), and includes plenty of pretty CSS bits (webfonts, transitions etc). It'll hopefully have a bookmarklet, and a decent API … we'll see.
There's also been some activity on my open source projects, which is amazing. to-markdown has had some important updates (and has gained a few followers along the way!). Thanks to Henri Bergius, it now runs on Node.js (another technology I need to get properly stuck into). ios-placeholder has been updated thanks to Ned Schwartz, and juration will be getting the 'chrono' format support soon (thanks to Jonathan Otto). Hopefully I'll get these pull requests merged in soon: my head has been stuck in that little side-project of mine!
In other news, I'm giving Sublime Text 2 a go (Sam has not stopped going on about it!). I'm getting into it, thanks to this Sublime Text 2 guide, and @sublimetips twitter feed. One essential package for those who regularly deal with erb views: SublimeERB (available via Package Control, but don't forget to add the key bindings, as detailed in the readme).
I've been meaning to get this quotation down for ages. I heard it on Radio 4's Chain Reaction programme back in September last year, when Kevin Eldon interviewed Mark Steel.
I think lampposts soon will have little meters on, and you'll put 5p in and it'll give you just enough light to get to the next one: "Why should I pay for someone else's light? I'M INDOORS!… bloody fire-brigade — I'm not on fire! I'll pay when I want carrying over someones shoulder down a smoky bannister!"
These are the sort of people that go: "What about guide dogs? All the money that gets spent on them! I can't climb a tree, nobody buys me a gibbon!"
I don't plan on writing much about neuroscience(!), but the following quotation caught my ear. It comes from BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific – a series of interviews with scientists about their life and work.
It's not a programme I'd usually seek out – it just happens to be on after the Today programme, but every episode I've heard has been really interesting, and has got me thinking.
Neuroscience calls itself a science (obviously), but it's very different from [a physicist's] science of physics, or a chemist's science of chemistry, because it's a set of techniques searching for a common answer, rather than a real structured level of analysis of a scientific problem.
... in physics, the questions are agreed. You could walk into any physicist's office or lab, and say, "What are the big questions in physics?", and they'd reel them off: "How did the universe start?", "What's matter made of?"; and everyone would agree. But if you ask that question to a neuroscientist, they'd just be puzzled by the question.
The BBC are currently running a series on some of the untold stories of World War II. The first was Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes, and told the story of how one of the most sophisticated codes was broken (the Lorenz), which led to the invention of the first computer. It's a great watch.
I've visted Bletchley Park a couple of times. It's a fascinating place, pretty much untouched since the war and well worth a visit.
Talking nonsense the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I am human. Not one single truth has ever been arrived at without people first having talked a dozen reams of nonsense, even ten dozen reams of it, and that's an honourable thing in its own way; well, but we can't even talk nonsense with our own brains! Talk nonsense to me, by all means, but do it with your own brain, and I shall love you for it. To talk nonsense in one's own way is almost better than to talk a truth that's someone else's; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot!
Truth be told it's been a bit more than ten years taking pictures, but that doesn't make such a good title. Anyway, I thought I'd pick out some photos from the archives and put together a review.
1990s/Early 2000s — School
The first time I can remember taking pictures was some time in the 90s, with a Polaroid 600 camera that my sister and I saved up for. I started studying photography at school when I was 16/17. It began with a William Eggleston / Ansel Adams exhibition at the Hayward. I probably couldn't have chosen a better exhibition to be my first. Adams one of the greatest landscape photographers of all time; while Eggleston pioneered the use of colour photography as art during the 70s. Both still influence my thoughts when I look through the viewfinder.
My dad had a nice SLR (like most dads of his generation), and I began shooting a few rolls with it immediately after that first exhibition. I still have these films somewhere, and will post some highlights when I get round to digitising them.
I was also lucky enough to have access to a couple of dark rooms at school, and was taught how to develop and print black and white film. I developed an interest for urban landscape and night photography, as well as video installations. At the end of year exhibition, the video below was projected onto a clear perspex waterfall.
2004/5 — First Year, Uni
I only studied photography for a year, but missed taking pictures when I started university. I received a compact digital camera for Christmas — which I nearly didn't get after the postman left it in the recycling bin. I got back into photography with this camera, and started to get addicted to Flickr. My favourite photos with this camera are those of the Island of Lindisfarne (below). They may not be the sharpest, or clearest, but I'm pleased with how they feel. They pretty much mirror my memories, which is important to me.
2005/6 — Second Year, Uni
Having stumbled across lomokev on Flickr, I realised I missed the characteristics of film and the process of taking pictures with it. I swiftly bought a Lomo LC-A on eBay, and started experimenting with Jessops (Agfa) slide film. I'm not a fan of the whole lomography thing, but I can't say it hasn't influenced my style.
This was probably my most productive time taking pictures — I found it hard to pick a few favourites.
2006/7 — Abbey Road
I didn't take too many pictures while I was working at Abbey Road, but still kept up an interest. I mostly used my Lomo, but began to miss the control one gets with an SLR. I became rather disappointed with the expensive developing costs and the poor quality output from places like Jessops/Snappy Snaps/Boots — negatives would often be badly cut, have drying marks all over them, and scans would have some awful colour correction applied. I started scanning prints and negatives at home, with a relatively cheap scanner.
In order to satisfy my need for a bit more control, I began to look into rangefinders, and received a Zorki 4K (a Leica replica) for Christmas. It's a purely mechanical camera, therefore repairable at home, but also prone to locking up. It did, however, come with a (highly sought after) Jupiter 8 lens. Here's some Abbey Road detail taken with that lens:
2007/8 — Final Year, Uni
Just before starting my final year, I spent a week in Switzerland followed by a week camping on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, with the aim of taking photos and getting ideas for music. After Agfa went bust, and stopped producing (Jessops) slide film, I shot a lot more with regular colour film. Cross-processing slide film can be cool, but I think I prefer the feel of the regular stuff.
Photography in my final year at university focussed on evenings out and making music. I was listening to (and studying) a lot of glitchy electronic music, which partly explains my enjoyment of lo-fi photography and the Lomo. I looked into other lo-fi such as the JamCam (a cheap digital camera), as well as disposable cameras. The following is typical of the JamCam.
I realised I hadn't captured many moments with my friends, so I made a start. As a result, I discovered how much I enjoy portraiture — not the staged kind, just moments.
2008—10
After graduating I inherited a rather nice SLR from my Dad's work (unsurprisingly, they no longer use film to take pictures of microscopic slides). It came with a macro lens (which I've yet to use) and so it wasn't until I bought a lens in Oxfam some time in 2010 that I considered using it (see New York pictures, below).
I didn't feel particularly inspired to take pictures other than when I was on holiday or on special occasions. My lovely girlfriend and I visited Iceland and New York, where most my favourites from this time have come from.
I'd been looking get back into darkroom photography since university. I got so far as to ask in Jessops for some photographic chemicals. The assistant returned a clueless expression, which was rather disheartening (especially as I was job hunting at the time!).
However, as has been the theme for much of the last ten years, I received some photographic equipment for Christmas last year, this time in the form of a changing bag and darkroom chemicals. I also inherited some developing trays and tanks from my uncle.
So I'm back into DIY black and white photography, and it feels great. I've only developed a few rolls, and with every one I've got stupidly nervous about the whole process. But I like that.
I still haven't got the space to fit my enlarger(s) but I've bought a decent flatbed scanner that does the job nicely.
I feel a bit more inspired to go and take photos of anything, now, though still not as much as I'd like to. I always carry my Lomo or my Olympus mju II — another bargain from a charity shop.
Future
I like to think I'll continue taking pictures on film and have the means to do so in the future, simply because I enjoy the process so much. I don't see my equipment changing much — I have quite enough cameras! Hopefully I'll set up a proper darkroom someday, and get printing again. That'd be nice.
I've been pretty busy recently on a couple of small projects. As the name suggests, iOS Placeholder is a jQuery plugin that emulates the iOS behaviour of placeholder text in the browser. It's inspired by Robert Nyman's ideas on placeholder text behaviour, and offers clearer labelling of input fields once they are in focus.
The second project, Juration, is a simple time range parser/humanizer, inspired by the chronic and chronic_duration Ruby gems. Parsing takes a duration in words (e.g. 3mins 50secs) and returns that value in seconds. Stringifying does the inverse - taking a value in seconds and converting it to words. Feel free to have a play on the Juration demo page.
Plenty has been written about the web as a flexible (or 'unstable') platform, but I thought I'd collect my thoughts anyway.
Despite being written over 10 years ago, John Allsopp's A Dao of Web Design couldn't be more relevant today, and is a great starting point. It's well worth a read, but I'll summarise.
It basically encourages web designers to:
Recognise the strengths of print design, but treat the web as its own platform
Abandon control of 'the page' - embrace the lack of physical constraints and see it as an advantage
Create adaptable, accessible experiences that best make use of the web's characteristics
Consider function over form
Inspiring stuff.
Of course, many of these ideas are can also be applied to software design, and I'm reminded of Apple and their latest software interfaces, notably iCal for OS X Lion and iPad apps such as Notes (pictured below) or iBooks. Feelings begin with, "oOo, nice details!"; then move on to, "it's quite 'noisy' and a bit distracting"; to "why am I pressing a button embedded in leather?".
In his OS X Lion review, John Siracusa picks up on this, pointing out the disparity between the look of interface and the way it behaves i.e. although it may look like you can tear off pages, and scribble in the margins...you can't. It's just interface noise.
Perfection [in design] is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
However, that's not to say that we should be creating totally flat interfaces. I think it's a balance between minimalism and rich UI - go too far in the minimal direction, and you may end up creating a bland user experience; too far in the other direction, and you could end up with noise that doesn't make much sense.
Software allows us to do crazy things (like plonking buttons in leather), but simply replicating physical objects in a software interface, I feel, isn't particularly imaginative. Think of how far the boundaries could be pushed if the time spent perfecting iCal's faux-leather stitching, was instead spent on rethinking the calendar or how we could better organise our time[1].
Despite Apple taking the direction they have, there's definitely been a move in the web community to explore the capabilities of this unfixed platform. Just check out some of the examples of parallax scrolling.
I'd love to see more examples of web design that gets this concept spot on. If you have any in mind, tweet at me.
Ever since I started using Rails, Git and Heroku, I've been looking for a way to use these tools to create basic websites that have a nice interface for managing content.
I'd normally approach this kind of site with Wordpress. I like it's easy installation and the features it has out of the box; but getting it setup with Git and keeping development/production environments in sync (+ deployment) is a bit of a headache[1].
What's more, as with most content management systems I've used, I've often found myself using ugly fixes to force it do do what I want it to, or trawling through directories to find a plugin that's sure not to break when I upgrade the CMS.
I've briefly looked into Radiant and Refinery: Rails-based alternatives that work fine within a Git workflow; but while they maybe easy to learn, I'd rather be getting to know Rails better, rather than the particular workings of a CMS (I know, this sounds lazy!).
The best solution I've come across so far is Rails Admin, which, as the name implies, provides a simple way to administer content on a Rails backend. Although I've only just started using it, it appears to have just the bare minimum features necessary to create/update content - allowing me to make the decisions about how my data is organised.
Installation is easy and getting something up and running couldn't be quicker. This is probably because I work more with Ruby/Rails than I do with php/Wordpress (or any other CMS); but it suits me - particularly as I can focus on creating web apps with Rails and learning Ruby (a bit nicer than php, in my humble opinion!)
[1] For example, it's all too easy modify files outside of the Git workflow - what with the ability to update the CMS via the Wordpress interface.
I had a reputation at university for being rather slow at writing essays. I'd labour over every sentence, making sure it was clear and concise and the best it could possibly be before moving on to the next one. As you can imagine, when you've got thousands of words to write, this process doesn't work very well.
This attention to detail still manifests itself in the work I do everyday, and it can be painful (believe it or not, this sentence is the product of many iterations!); but I have some thoughts, and bizarrely enough, I miss writing them down. So I will start.
That's all for now, though. It's taken me long enough.
