Danny DeBelius

Blue skies headed into the weekend.

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:18:21 -0400

Blue skies headed into the weekend.

Scales.

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:22:44 -0500

Scales.

Sunday night.

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:14:00 -0500

Sunday night.

A tiny XX concert. (at NPR Headquarters)

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:11:00 -0500

A tiny XX concert. (at NPR Headquarters)

2013

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 20:14:00 -0500

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.

Mall walk.

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 10:16:00 -0400

Mall walk.

The New York Times has graciously provided us a great test case...

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 08:24:00 -0400

The New York Times has graciously provided us a great test case for the long-running discussion of vertical scrolling versus horizontal paging in digital reading experiences.

To my eyes there is no contest. The comfortable measure and web-native vertical scroll behavior of the web app is far superior to the app store multiple-column layout from an ease-of-reading perspective.

Which experience do you prefer?

Today I set up my own Brian Boyer-style RWD testing rig with...

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:31:00 -0400

Today I set up my own Brian Boyer-style RWD testing rig with this Griffin PowerMate and Brian’s sample Applescript. Such a great idea.

Thanks, Brian!

Innovation in Journalism Goes Begging for Support

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 08:57:00 -0400

Innovation in Journalism Goes Begging for Support:

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.

A few shots from the Code With Me workshop hosted at NPR this...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 08:02:00 -0400

A few shots from the Code With Me workshop hosted at NPR this weekend. Many thanks to Sisi Wei and Tom Giratikanon for leading the effort.

Full gallery over on Flickr.

A Sunday afternoon walk down Pennsylvania Ave.

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 07:46:00 -0400

For all your Sunday afternoon napping needs.

Navy Memorial.

Newseum.

Upside down, underwater.

A Sunday afternoon walk down Pennsylvania Ave.

Monday morning commute.

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:15:00 -0400

Monday morning commute.

When Craigslist Blocks Innovations

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 11:57:00 -0400

When Craigslist Blocks Innovations:

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?

ER (Taken with Cinemagram)

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:05:00 -0400

ER (Taken with Cinemagram)

"The disruption was not that we now finally had a nice phone; it was that, for better or for worse,..."

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:22:50 -0400

“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

New New Rdio

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 13:33:00 -0400

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.

chartsnthings: Shan Carter (and an army of others) share some sketches from the NYT electoral map

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:35:46 -0400

chartsnthings: Shan Carter (and an army of others) share some sketches from the NYT electoral map:

Kevin Quealy :

…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.

Visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library today and the Air...

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:51:20 -0400

Visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library today and the Air Force One Pavilion was worth the price of admission.

City of Angels (Taken with Instagram at Griffith Observatory)

Sun, 06 May 2012 23:50:20 -0400

City of Angels (Taken with Instagram at Griffith Observatory)

Paper has been hyped to me by multiple extremely smart,...

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:48:00 -0400

Paper has been hyped to me by multiple extremely smart, extremely talented folks at NPR, but I remained skeptical given my utter uselessness with at least three other drawing apps I’ve tried on iPad so far.

I’ve come around after spending some time with it this afternoon. Paper removes the paralysis of choice Adobe Ideas gave me with infinite brush size and color combinations while retaining just enough stroke variations to effectively translate the travel of a Wacom Bamboo stylus into UI sketches that don’t make me feel like I am a total fraud.

If you’ve been frustrated by the results other iPad drawing apps have yielded, I highly recommend you give tablet sketching another try with Paper.