Showing all posts tagged: design

The one-hundred best book covers of 2024 by PRINT

13 January 2025

PRINT’s annual list of the best book covers of 2024, features double the number of entries as 2023, one-hundred, up from fifty. Either a record number of books were published in 2024, or cover design has become so good more books needed to be included.

Among inclusions is a cover for Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s latest novel, which features a chess board. Not the version of the cover I’ve seen in this part of the world, but it is damn fine.

The chess board cover version was designed by New York based illustrators June Park and Rodrigo Corral. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but book cover designers do not always receive the recognition they deserve for their work.

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Favourite monospaced font for coding, do people have such a thing?

31 December 2024

Code is code, what difference does the font you choose in whatever app you use for coding possibly make? As long as the code works as intended, what does appearance have to do with it?

But the conversation I found on the topic — which in fact started months ago — actually relates to a writer’s favourite font for writing — as in copy, not code — which is kind of intriguing.

Intriguing, because I’ve never given the matter the slightest thought. Obviously on my website I have chosen a particular display font, but when it comes to drafting my posts, no, I pretty much use one of the fonts the app offers.

These fonts are certainly not monospaced fonts (for all their virtues), which is where the discussion seemed to later turn. I write all my posts, together with the necessary HTML tags, on a word processing app, and when ready, copy and paste the text into WordPress.

I know I’m missing something using this process, because I read about the way other people use (what sounds like) a number of apps, before their blog post drafts are fed into their blog publishing software. But when it comes to a favourite font for drafting, whatever that might be, there isn’t one.

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The web today is not necessarily worse than the early web

27 December 2024

Xavier H.M., writing on his Mastodon page:

Your neocities blog is cute but I can’t read the 5pt font and your cursor is the size of a bread crumb. The web page is loading so many gifs my computer sounds like a boeing 747.

disassociated once, in a way, looked like a Neocities website. Or, more the point, way back in the day: GeoCities-esque. My websites of twenty-five years ago may have seemed like the work of a web designer trying to be artistic, but the way they were built presented problems to some visitors, particularly those with low vision. For example, much text on my early sites was rendered as images.

The facility to use alternative text, or alt-text, was always there, as far as I remember, but like a lot of visual web designers of the time, I did not make effective use of the facility. For example, if say I was posting a photo of a tree, the alt text would literally read “a tree”. I’d say nothing about where the tree stood. Along a road? In a park? Near a body of water? Nor anything else that would help describe the image more fully to people who had trouble seeing it.

As for blocks of text rendered as images — this to maintain complete design control across different browsers and operating systems — I probably supplied no alt-text, even though it would not have been difficult to do so. In other words, much of the content was invisible to some visitors.

And then we get around to font and cursor sizes that would suit an ant. For sure, it’s all fun, but doesn’t work for everyone. Those early days were more about aesthetics rather than accessibility. Today’s websites and blogs might look bland, might look all the same, but they are easier for a greater number of people to use, and, as a bonus, aren’t too demanding on our devices.

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Mocha Mousse 17-1230 selected as the PANTONE colour of year 2025

13 December 2024

An image of a five pointed star in the colour of PANTONE Mocha Mousse

We’re twelve days out from the big one, and high in the silly season, as the brevity of recent posts here may allude to. Otherwise, the major highlight has to be the annual announcement of the PANTONE colour of the year. As I wrote two years ago, this was a big deal during my web design days. Well, a somewhat big deal, as we were always on the lookout for new colour inspiration.

Anyway, the PANTONE colour for 2025 is Mocha Mousse 17-1230. Mocha Mousse. I can’t decide if that’s a dessert, or a hair product. Whatever, I’m liking it. Here’s how PANTONE describe the hue:

Simple and Comforting: A Soft, Warming Brown. With its sophisticated, earthy elegance, PANTONE 17-1230 Mocha Mousse can stand alone or serve as a versatile foundation, enhancing a wide range of palettes and applications—from minimalist to richly detailed designs—across all color-focused industries.

To whip up some designs featuring Mocha Mousse in your favourite graphics editor, here are some common colour generating codes. The HEX code is #9e7a68. If Red, Green, and Blue is your thing, use these values: R = 158, G = 122 B = 104. On the CMYK colour model, go C = 31%, M = 47%. Y = 49%, K = 18%. For the HSB colour system, go H = 20°, S = 34%, B = 62%.

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Y2K, a film by Kyle Mooney, the Y2K bug seriously strikes back

12 December 2024

I’m not sure if this horror re-imagining, trailer, of the Y2K “bug” will have a cinematic run in Australia, or is going straight to streaming.

Two high school nobodies make the decision to crash the last major celebration before the new millennium on New Year’s Eve 1999. The night becomes even crazier than they could have ever dreamed when the clock strikes midnight.

With dire fears of road traffic signals failing, ATMs crashing (causing some people to keep cash on hand), and aeroplanes falling out of the sky at midnight, on the first of January 2000, what more would you want in a horror story?

Those who came in post 1999, can read more about the Y2K bug here, but here’s a quick summary of the problem:

Many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Computer systems’ inability to distinguish dates correctly had the potential to bring down worldwide infrastructures for computer reliant industries.

Apparently some organisations spent up big trying to fend off the bug, although some IT experts felt the money could’ve been put to better use. In late 1999, I was having some weird computer (think clunky desktop with bloated monitor with an actually pretty small screen) problem (of a Windows nature, not Y2K), and had a computer fix-it guy come around and look at it. The issue was resolved, but I ended up being auto-subscribed to the fix-it people’s monthly newsletter.

Out of politeness, I read the first few newsletters they sent, before unsubscribing. In the February, or maybe March 2000 edition, they did a “recap” of their clients’ Y2K bug experiences. The fix-it people claimed many, many, organisations had averted catastrophe, thanks to their efforts. Unfortunately, or conveniently, as the case may be, not one of these organisations wished to talk publicly about how the fix-it people had saved them from certain doom. Of course.

In late 1999, I launched a Y2K bug inspired Neocities-like version of disassociated, here’s a screen grab. See them bugs in the lower right hand corner, hey? I picked up on the idea of traffic signals failing, and roads choked full of cars, trapped amid the chaos. Notice also the news box. They were ubiquitous on personal websites of the day; a design trend. Today the whole site is a news box.

Mooney’s movie might make for a great glimpse of the world, and the internet, in late 1999 though.

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One Minute Park, One Million Checkboxes, win Tiny Awards 2024

29 August 2024

One Minute Park by Elliott Cost, has been named winner of the main prize of the Tiny Awards 2024, while One Million Checkboxes by Nolen Royalty, took out the multiplayer player gong.

One is your lucky number this year. Held annually since last year, 2023, the Tiny Awards recognise excellence in non-commercial websites designed by individuals and/or or groups of creators.

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Dense Discovery notches three hundred editions, opens reader community

7 August 2024

Melbourne based Australian designer and publisher Kai Brach’s weekly publication, Dense Discovery (DD), is one of the few newsletters I subscribe to. If you have an interest in, well, everything, then DD is for you. First published in September 2018, the three-hundredth edition was posted yesterday.

And to mark this most impressive of milestones, Brach launched a community space, the DD Lounge, especially for supporters, friends of DD. That a regular newsletter can go on to spawn a community says a lot. Yes, I know there are other similar such communities, but still it’s something.

Congratulations on publishing three-hundred editions DD.

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disassociated turns twenty-one again, sort of

6 August 2024

This is — again: sort of/timeline page content, which seems to be a bit popular on InterWebs and IndieWeb at the moment.

Today — or rather last Sunday 4 August 2024 — does not really mark the twenty-first birthday of disassociated. That would’ve been back in 2018, given the first non-blog inception of this website went online in 1997. But, the oldest, presently published blog post, dates back to Monday 4 August 2003. A post about the Windows Operating System (OS), NT4, that I’d been forced to stop using, after upgrading my then computer.

I had a few nice things to say about Windows OS’s back then, quite the contrast to the present time. Ever since properly rebooting disassociated in May 2022*, I’ve gradually been restoring selected old posts from the early days. The post I wrote twenty-one years ago, predates content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, and was instead written onto a static HTML page.

In 2007, as I was preparing to migrate to WordPress, I spent several months copy and pasting several years of “blog” posts onto a template, I would later upload into my first WordPress database. WordPressing, was the term I used to describe that process. But anyway, there we have it. Twenty-one years (unless I restore even older posts, and there’s one or two), of blog posts at disassociated.

But then again, who doesn’t like turning twenty-one a few times?

* though I’d sort of been back since September 2021.

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Tiny Awards 2024 shortlist announced, public voting open

24 July 2024

The shortlists for the 2024 Tiny Awards have been published. Now in their second year, the Tiny Awards honour “interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be.” Think the work of small, and independent creatives.

To be eligible, websites need to be non-commercial, and launched during, or after, June 2023.

Rotating Sandwiches — a website featuring images of rotating sandwiches, go and see for yourself — won the inaugural award in 2023. The 2024 winners — there are two categories, main award, and multiplayer — will be announced on Sunday 18 August 2024.

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Sometimes my personal website looks like a bad photo of me

17 July 2024

Stefan Bohacek writing on his Mastodon page:

The problem with redesigning your personal website is that it looks great for about a week, and then you start to hate it.

This is a problem of the ages. In the late 1990’s I’d redesign my websites (I had several back then) every few weeks. Or what felt like every few weeks. The need to constantly update came from the desire to look as good as the other ever-changing personal sites that were around then.

It was also necessary — you understand — to be up with the absolute latest design trends, and apply our own interpretations and variations of them to our websites.

For instance, does anyone remember, or know of, TV lines? See an example here (not my work). TV lines became de rigueur with fad-like ferocity in late 1999 I think. If you didn’t feature at least a few images with TV lines, you were no longer with the times, you were w-a-y behind them.

The notion that a website should be redesigned about every six months began to emerge, perhaps, in early 2000. The idea being some consistency in appearance was desirable, while not lasting forever. It also, mercifully, gave us time to focus on other things. Non web things, among them.

Today, the design of disassociated has barely changed in years. It’s been in a single column “note pad” format since, I don’t know 2009/2010? The “d” logo came along in around 2013. It changes colour now and then. I call the current inception the “fruit salad” logo. It’s been here for two years.

The overall site design feels a bit bare sometimes, but I like to keep things on the minimal side. Pictures — when I post them — are meant to stand out, and not be swallowed up by the design. Otherwise though, I don’t have much time presently to think about whether I like the look or not. It’s a bit busy elsewhere right now, and writing posts is really my main priority.

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