March 2013
1 post
February 2013
2 posts
January 2013
2 posts
2013
Things were getting dusty with a faint hint of adaptive grid moldiness around here, so I finally took the plunge and retooled the design with the goal of moving to a fluid-grid responsive design focused on readability and large photo display.
We’re still coming to you live from Tumblr’s AWS servers, with static files served from my own S3 bucket. I toyed with the idea of moving over to Wordpress, but the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t add up for me. I love not having to maintain a server running MySQL, and Tumblr seems to have hit their stride on the uptime issues which have all but disappeared in the last year. No, I don’t have a copy of my blog’s data in a structured format, but I am backing up content to Dropbox via IFTTT in case of catastrophic data loss. Creating a new Tumblr theme from scratch was cake with Dave Santos’ Tumblr Boilerplate to establish a solid baseline of all the various content types.
The old layout was built on top of Dave Gamache’s great Skeleton grid and typography package. The new design abandons Skeleton in favor of a frankenstein monster of Bootstrap’s typography and mixins package and Zurb Foundation’s fluid grid. Bootstrap’s grid is solid, but the Zurb tool is slightly more robust with discrete mobile grid assignments and push/pull offsets. I opted to use LESS for preprocessing, which means the Foundation grid is included as pure CSS instead of the SASS component from the Foundation package. The LESS files are authored in Sublime Text and compiled with the LESS-build package before being shipped off to S3.
Body copy is set in Freight Text Pro and most everything else is Freight Sans Pro. Fonts are served by Typekit.
Visually, this is the most minimal design I’ve ever deployed on the site. Type-driven and stripped-down may be the flavor of the month, but I feel strongly that it’s the right toolkit for the mix of content the site has historically seen. Here’s hoping an uncluttered palette will be the catalyst for more and better content on the blog going forward.
October 2012
3 posts
Play
September 2012
1 post
Innovation in Journalism Goes Begging for Support →
nytimes.com
David Carr’s excellent report on the last-ditch attempt to fund Homicide Watch through a Kickstarter campaign contains some important and thought-provoking observations about the state of philanthropic funding in the world of journalism.
I thought about Homicide Watch when I read Alan D. Mutter’s recent post about the big chunks of financing that are going to tiny experimental outfits named The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. In May, the Ford Foundation gave The Times $1 million over two years to hire five reporters to cover ethnic and prison issues even though the paper is owned by the Tribune Company, which may be in bankruptcy but has amassed nearly $2.4 billion in cash during its three and a half years in court.
In July, the foundation awarded The Washington Post $500,000 for government accountability reporting.
The numbers are staggering in comparison to the modest $40,000 goal to fund another year of homicide coverage in Washington. Carr agreed:
Shouldn’t financing meant for journalistic innovation go to the green shoots like Homicide Watch and not be used to fertilize giant dead-tree media? I am all for putting more reporting boots on the ground, but the existential dilemma confronting media will require new answers, not stopgap funds for legacy approaches.
Late Sunday evening the Homicide Watch campaign reached its goal with three days left on the clock and nearly $1,000 in additional contributions. I am thrilled for my friends, and so relieved that a broad coalition of supporters recognized the value of Laura and Chris’ work in a community severely underserved on this important beat.
Difficult questions remain, though, when successful bootstrapped journalism startups lose out to legacy news operations in the hunt for foundational giving.
August 2012
2 posts
July 2012
4 posts
When Craigslist Blocks Innovations →
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Nick Bilton:
So why hasn’t anyone managed to unseat Craigslist, a site that has barely changed in close to two decades?
It has dug an effective moat by cultivating an exaggerated image of “doing good” that keeps its customers loyal, while behind the scenes, it bullies any rivals that come near and it stifles innovation.
This is a great read that touched on a lot of questions I’ve had about the legality of Padmapper’s relationship to Craigslist, and I’m glad to see somebody call a spade a spade with regard to Craigslist’s bullying tactics.
How long can Craigslist defend their incumbent position through legal threats while refusing to improve their UX?
“The disruption was not that we now finally had a nice phone; it was that, for better or for worse, we would now never again be without a computer or the Internet.”
—John Gruber
June 2012
1 post
New New Rdio
Below are the collected reactions of some of my favorite designers and developers to Rdio’s second web and desktop UI refresh in three months.
May 2012
4 posts
chartsnthings: Shan Carter (and an army of others) share some sketches from the NYT electoral map →
chartsnthings.tumblr.com
…no one was really super thrilled with maps as the main conduit for the analysis. Instead, they decided on minimizing the geography and using “bins” for states. (Shan has sort of been obsessed with “bins” since 2008, when his dream of having states magically fall into buckets on election night ultimately didn’t pan out. I personally had to cheer him up after that and it was not pretty.)
Here is another great reminder for map-happy news nerds that sometimes the important patterns of a story are not really geographic in a way that is best conveyed through a choropleth or proportional symbol map. This graphic is brilliant and the process behind it is well worth your time.
