David Sleight, someone whose work I’ve admired for years, is finally striking out on his own.

Do right by yourselves, people. If you need an insightful creative director, an insanely talented designer, and/or a talented, thoughtful developer, hire the hell out of him.

∞

So this is somewhat interesting. Here’s the skinny:

• Let’s say you’re using a WebKit-based browser.
• Let’s also say that you’re mucking around with a little @font-face, along with a few other CSS shinies.
• Now, let’s also also say that you’re mucking around with <a href="http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/InternetWeb/Conceptual/SafariVisualEffectsProgGuide/Transitions/Transitions.html">-webkit-transition</a>, a less-than-standard but still somewhat sexy stylesheet property—specifically, you’re applying a CSS transition to a link when the user hovers over it.

What’s the result? Well, if you’re hovering over the link while your text is being resized, it looks something like this:

So in short, -webkit-transition and @font-face produce a weird, freaky love child visual bug if you’re hovering over a link and resizing your text. The text will temporarily revert to the next non-@font-face font in the stack—Helvetica above—before re-applying the proper typeface.

Which, yes, I realize probably nobody will do. Still, I think it’s kind of an interesting little tic. Plus, it affects all WebKit-based desktop browsers I tested on, notably Safari and Chrome. Remove the @font-face assignment or the -webkit-transition, and the bug goes away.

Granted, it’s no systemic rounding error, but hey: what is?

Let’s just, y’know, assume that you had a lot of mass transit in your immediate future. Not me. You. In a purely hypothetical situation, o’ course.

What movies, music, or TV shows would you bring along?

This is the song that never ends.

I can’t tell you how much I played Another World in high school. So seeing a pure JavaScript-driven port to canvas? Simply amazing.

On a related note, I’ll be over here sobbing into my stylesheets if anyone needs me.

∞

Dan Cederholm moves over to Wordpress, tweaking his site’s design as he does so. Which is lovely, of course, but not as lovely as this:

If anything, [the new design is] a slight step backward, to the layouts of SimpleBits’ past. Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.

I’ve been thinking the same thing lately: that this whole quasi-tumblelog thing I’ve been playing around with isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As Merlin Mann said: Jesus, I miss paragraphs.

∞

Thomas Fuchs (he of script.aculo.us and Prototype fame) whips up a Ruby script that can automate subpixel antialiasing on strings of text.

In other words: OMG.

∞

Lovely on not a few levels:

Directed by Chris Tootell, music by Paper Beat Scissors.

Also: I’m apparently “Этан Маркотт” in Cyrillic. Which somehow strikes me as supremely badass.

∞

So, right. Dan and I conducted this whole contest thing. Once we closed the contest, our plan was to take an extra day, read through the entries, and pick two winners.

Then we got stupid busy. I know, I know—cue the Buscemi. Still, we feel awful about the delay: we only recently found time to sift through everyone’s amazing entries, pick out two winners, and then, finally, blog about it.

(This is the part where we blog about it.)

So. After much, much too much delay, we’re pleased to announce that the two winners of #hcsshaiku have been selected. The judging was rough, people—Dan and I both had lists of a dozen or so favorites, and the debate got heated. It almost came to blows. True story. (Not really.)

Okay, enough with the digressions—you came here for winners. First up is this stellar entry, winning @wilto a free ticket to the Handcrafted CSS workshop:

IE6 lives on.
Box model—and heart—broken.
position: fetal;

Tying for first (and another free ticket), we’ve got @squaregirl’s ode to debugging and BSG. We think.

Curly braces sound cute.
Until you leave one out. Oops!
I fracked my stylesheet.

And there we have it. wilto</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/squaregirl">squaregirl, if you’d be so kind to email info at handcraftedcss dot com, we’ll hook you up with your registration information!

Once again, we’d like to thank Campaign Monitor for sponsoring these two tickets. And of course, thanks so much to everyone who entered—the writing was top, top notch, and Dan and I were both floored by the response. We really hope you’ll consider joining us at the workshop on 14 September. But! We’ve only twenty-ish seats left, and there are only two weeks until the show. So register soon—we’d love to see you there.

Introducing Typedia, Jason Santa Maria’s labor of love. Billed as “a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them,” Jason describes it as “a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type.” I helped a very little bit in bringing it online, but the work was really done by a team of incredibly talented individuals.

Read Jason’s launch announcement when you have a moment, and check out Dan Mall’s write-up as well. Congratulations, all!

∞

This all might be very familiar to you by now, but here we are.

So there’s this guy Dan, see, and he decided to write a book. I contributed a chapter. Crippling bias aside, the book we wrote is damned good. (The book we wrote is also very, very pretty.) While writing the book, we thought that planning a workshop to “teach the book” for a day would be fun. So we planned it. We started selling tickets. A lot of them. We got excited. We sold more tickets. We got more excited.

This brings us to present day: tickets for the day-long Handcrafted CSS workshop are selling fast, and Dan and I are in the throes of conference-planning excitement. (That’s a thing. Honest.) Early bird registration closed on Friday, but we’ve also cooked up a little raffle to get a couple more seats filled. So if you want a free ticket to our Handcrafted CSS seminar, here’s the skinny:

1. Log into your Twitter account. (Or, um, get a Twitter account. Because we all need an excuse to shorten our attention spaOH LOOK SOMETHING SHINY IN THE DISTANCE BRB)
2. Write a haiku about web design.
3. Include the #hcsshaiku hashtag in your tweet.

That’s it. Over the next twenty-four hours, we’ll be watching the entries roll in, counting your syllables all the while. The two best haikus will win a free registration in our one-day workshop, courtesy of Campaign Monitor, event sponsors extraordinaire.

So haul out your oversized quill pens and your favorite inkwell, and start draftin’. Hope to see you in September!

(Sōkan would’ve totally wanted to get in on this. Just so you know.)

Making something “free” is obviously an allocation strategy. “Free” attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn’t sustainable, and that brief is underpriced.

We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.

(IOW, TLDR.)

∞

Beautiful collection of stills taken from movie titles, categorized by decade. (Via Rumsey Taylor on Twitter.)

∞

When we announced the book, we did say to “stay tuned.” To wit:

We’ve been planning this for ages, so we’re excited to finally announce “Handcrafted CSS: A Day of Markup & Style,” a one-day workshop presented by Dan Cederholm and yours truly on September 14, 2009 at the Hawthorne Hotel in picturesque Salem, Massachusetts.

For those who register, Dan and I will start the day by handing you a complimentary copy of Handcrafted CSS’s Video Edition (the book plus the DVD). From there, the book’s authors (that’d be Dan and I—hiya!) will spend the day presenting the content over four information-packed sessions, with an in-depth Q&A/discussion session to round out the day. And if you eat food, we’ve got you covered: breakfast, lunch, and the occasional snack break will be catered.

Oh, and did we mention the evening wrap party? Yeah. We have one of those.

We’re thrilled to be able to finally announce the workshop. Doubly so because of its location: The Hawthorne Hotel is located in downtown Salem, roughly sixteen miles from downtown Boston. For those who are mass transit hounds like me, Salem’s MBTA Commuter Rail station is an easy ~25 minute train ride from Boston, and the Hawthorne is a short walk once you’ve arrived.

So if you’ve ever wanted to go to one hell of a book release event in one of New England’s prettier towns, now’s your chance. Early bird registration is currently open at a discounted price of $399 per person, so come on over and sign up! We’ve got 100 seats available, and we’d love to see you in one of them.

Interested in sponsoring the event? Dan or I would love to hear from you. Drop us a line!

So this Dan fellow went and wrote another book. It’s called Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design. After having read it, I can safely say that it’s going to be really great stuff. Much of Dan’s writing and speaking over the past year has been about this notion of “web craftsmanship,” of producing compelling design through a careful attention to detail.

As you can imagine, a book like that isn’t geared to high-level overviews. And frankly, it’s better for it: Dan jumps right into how advanced CSS and CSS3 can invigorate the design techniques we’ve come to rely upon over the years. By anchoring the book’s chapters to a website for the fictional “Tugboat Coffee Company”, Dan grounds each of his examples in practical, real world examples. Wondering how you can start using rgba() color declarations today, or how best to rock your border-radius? The book has you covered, and it’s a fun, edifying read.

Why am I telling you all of this, you ask? Well, I actually contributed to Dan’s book, and I’m stupidly excited. I wrote an in-depth chapter on fluid grids, and how to apply them to a real-world site layout. Think of it as a more practical extension of my article for ALA, and the companion essay on fluid images: rather than covering abstract examples, the “Fluid Grids” chapter in Handcrafted CSS shows how to convert a fixed-width site into a flexible, bulletproof layout.

But even if I hadn’t contributed, this is a book to be excited about. Frankly, it’s really great to see that Dan’s got a new book out: he’s one of the more thoughtful, detail-oriented designers I know, and his writing has always reflected that. Handcrafted CSS a fun, informative read, and packed with great insight on how to practice true web craftsmanship.

So check out the site, read Dan’s announcement, follow the book on Twitter, and stay tuned: more announcements are forthcoming.

HomeSite was the very first HTML editor I used, and I still consider it one of the best. I’m sad to hear that it’s been discontinued. (Via Christian Heilmann on Twitter)

∞

Let’s talk nostalgia for a moment. I’m good at that.

For a too-short but delicious year starting in 2000, I worked in Boston for a Manhattan-based design studio (yeah, don’t ask), and spent my fair share of weeks in the SoHo office. At the time I was slinging more spacer GIFs and font tags than was probably wise, working twice as hard to get pages working in, well, basically two horribly incompatible browsers—as most of the three of you were, I’m guessing. Still, I like to think I got pretty good at my job: I developed some proficiency at anticipating the usual pitfalls, and how best to mangle my markup to dance around them. If you can call that a skill. But whatever: it worked, it met deadlines, and it made clients happy. “Version 4.0 and higher” was the song we sung back then, and our little studio sung it pretty damned well.

Then, in the span of one insane October week, I discovered Zeldman, the Web Standards Project, and A List Apart. Here was a guy who insisted there was a better way of working and, more importantly, that our current methods weren’t cutting it. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the most acute individual working online: it took me a full month to “get” the CSS Zen Garden, and I wholly blame the literature major for that one. But when Jeffrey told us exactly where we could send those awful, broken browsers, it struck one hell of a chord. I was hooked. A convert. A fan.

Fast forward a bit. The intervening years have brought plenty of the sturm and drung, but throughout it all I’ve remained a fan of the web standards community, and of Zeldman’s involvement specifically. That’s why it’s incredibly exciting (and not a little intimidating) to have been asked to co-author the next edition of Designing With Web Standards, Jeffrey’s little orange green bible on how to build a better web. Based off our initial plotting phone calls, there’s going to be quite a bit of new, awesome material in this refreshed edition, and I can’t wait to get to work.

So: I’m beyond flattered and deeply humbled. But most of all, I’m excited: it should be a fun few months, to say the least. Stay tuned, and thanks—as always—for reading.

Some fellow named Marc Edwards shows us how he created the interface for Beats, an iPhone app that I would absolutely never use, but now mysteriously crave with every fiber of my being oh shut up I know it’s the video’s fault:

Stupid sexy Flanders stop motion.

Posting has, the robot admits grudgingly, been utter shit of late. The usual excuses rear their usual, excuse-ish heads: work, life, et cetera ad infinitum. But I did want to take a moment, as there there are two things I’m loving quite a bit on the internet today.

Here is the first:

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

David Foster Wallace’s “Real Freedom,” the 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College

I oh-so-strongly urge you read the speech in its entirety, and possibly top it off with an awkwardly great interview between Wallace and Charlie Rose soliloquy by Wallace, which Charlie Rose sort of just sits and watches. I so wish I’d heard him speak, just once.

Oh, and the second internet thing I’m loving?

I can neither confirm nor deny that this is my new homepage.

I hope your day is wonderful.