Recent Blog Posts

I think this is the best S I’ve drawn. Ss are really hard to make. It’s not perfect, but I’m very pleased with it.

I’ve always used Roman numerals for the years on my work and in the footer of this site. Perhaps it’s annoying, pretentious, and dumb, but whatever. That’s not the point of this post. The point is I made an Eleventy shortcode to convert Arabic numerals to the Roman numerals we all have to think about the read.

As we pass the one year anniversary of my last blog post and arrive at the one year anniversary of the last time I was in a grocery store, it’s a good time to reflect on how much I’ve posted since then. Let’s see. I have posted absolutely nothing. Why not? Well, you see, since then a few things happened that put writing to the void on a long list of low priority items. So what happened?

I wanted an easier way to make guides in After Effects. I also wanted to learn more about scripting in Adobe apps. The best way to learn something is to make something. And, making a tool you’d use is very rewarding.

I’ve been working a lot on this site so I can apply the things I learn on projects I get paid to do. I’ve learned a lot the past few weeks and I’ve made some significant changes.

This blog has an RSS feed! I think I did it correctly. I didn’t use a plugin, I made a page with a loop that goes over all the blog posts and makes the RSS XML things.

I started doing calligraphy and lettering a couple years ago after I received The ABC of Custom Lettering by Ivan Castro for Christmas. I practice a lot. Although, not so much in the warmer months because I spend a most of my free time riding motorbikes. Now that there’s ice on the roads I’ll spend some of that time doing lettering and calligraphy. The rest will be spent on the endless, and sometimes overwhelming, task of learning and keeping up with web development.

To better understand variable fonts, I’ve been experimenting with making them and, for extra fun, animating them. The typeface I designed is called Chunklet. I love slab serifs and I wanted to make my own. It is a work in progress and may never be finished. It’s an exercise. When I started working on it it was a single weight. I soon realized it could be a variable font so I went for it. I’m still figuring things out but I’m learning.

The Distinguished Gentlemen’s Ride is taking place worldwide on September 29th. I’m participating again this year in Burlington, VT. Last year I raised $333 thanks to some very fine people. Sponsoring me would make me very happy.

I have been redesigning and redesigning this site for almost 10 years. I did many versions. I was so close to launching it a few times. I didn’t. I was never happy with it. The closest I got was putting a few versions on a staging site. Designing for yourself is hard. I can efficiently crank out good work for clients, but doing work for myself is a problem. I’m the worst client. “That’s a great start. Only one change: can you start over? —Best Regards”

I wanted to create something like the end credits of a movie for the colophon on this site. CodePen is great for sketching things out like that. It was a good exercise in flexbox and grid. Not to brag (maybe a bit), it was a Picked Pen on the CodePen front page. It’s encouraging when others see and like work I do. I’m a bit code shy, which is one of the reasons I got a CodePen Pro account: pens are private by default.

I tried to create blackletter calligraphy in pure css. This is my first Pen on CodePen. It’s not perfect, mind-blowing, or front-page-featuring.