I was looking up my web design heroes today and came across this post by Daniel Mall describing his start-to-finish process for creating a website.

I am very happy to say that I have naturally fallen into almost this exact process for the sites I’ve been contracted for lately (I tend to merge steps 2 and 3; the sites I’ve been doing haven’t been very large). It is a huge relief that I seem to be on the right track and thinking the right things on my own, at least from the perspective of one prominent designer in the field.

So a few weeks ago I sent my Creative Zen Aurvana in-ear headphones out under warranty because of a flaky connector. I just got them back today, and much to my pleasant surprise, they gave me a brand-new-in-box replacement, including all the accessories!

I now have double the amount of a lot of things I don’t really need.

One of the nice things about Blogger was the ease with which I could attach images to my posts; WordPress doesn’t have anything like that on a plain install. However, a bit of searching led me to Flickr and its really nice image blogging feature. I’m a fan.

Here we go! After a long unannounced hiatus, I have finally revamped and re-launched A Storied Present. Running on a WordPress backbone, the new site should be even more fun than before. 

Just as this site was originally just an online diary that grew to show off my music, again it has grown to include my design efforts. The new design incorporates separate Music and Design sections, which are to eventually serve as online portfolios.

I am excited to bring the new design to life, and to apply the finishing touches in the coming weeks.

I already covered this on Facebook, but I have to make a note in my log.

Good Intentions is now available on the US and Canadian iTunes Stores, as well as on eMusic, thanks to Tunecore.

I’m starting to write and record music more regularly now, which means I’ll probably have a new album ready to go at some point next year. With OEC going on on the side (or am I on the side?), I’m having a hard time deciding where new material ends up going. It may slow me down, or compel me to speed up.

If you’ve already bought the album, I thank you very much. If you haven’t, please hit up the iTunes store and have a taste.

… for my enduring love for OS X. Our relationship has been strained lately, but this article reminded me why Apple melts my heart. It’s all about text rendering.

A big problem with today’s computer displays is their resolution. It’s very low — 96 dots per inch is standard, whereas low-quality inkjet printing starts around 150dpi — and text is usually displayed at very small sizes. The problem with this is that suddenly each letter is only 5-10 pixels high, which is a staggeringly small amount of detail to work with. Many systems have been devised to make the most of the handful of pixels available; here’s a quick intro.

From the first article:

I’ll start with a tough statement. Microsoft played a dirty trick on the world. Windows XP way of text rendering has zero taste and zero engineering culture. Their text looks sharp and eye catching but wrong.

A lot of people don’t appreciate this, and I don’t blame them. It’s a trivial detail, one that’s unnoticeable save for a general feeling of “blurry” vs. “crisp”. Many people prefer crisp, but typefaces are works of art, and Microsoft’s way takes each letterform’s painstaking design for granted, opting for crisp lines over spacing and preservation of shape.

Furthermore, the article’s main point is that because Microsoft designed its rendering system in such as way as to work poorly when scaled to different dpi values, there is no motivation for display manufacturers to make higher-resolution displays. Enter Apple, with proprietary hardware and Leopard’s vector graphics, taking us into the future. Imagine a 20-inch monitor at, say, 8000x8000 resolution. It would be like nothing you’ve ever seen.

The article’s author dislikes Apple’s method of text rendering, but given the two, I will always choose the method that preserves the works of the type designers. Fonts are beautiful, and they should be beautiful no matter where they’re viewed.