Erik Spiekermann On Typography
They [letters] are my friends… Some people look at bottles of wine, or whatever – girls’ bottoms – I get kicks out of looking at type.
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About the Design
As much as my little, sensitive, inner artist struggles to get out and blossom into a flower, he’s beaten down and repressed by my more rough and tough wannabe inner developer, who in turn is completely overshadowed by the real me, a person with an entrepreneurial spirit and strong desire to imagine up neat things for fun and profit. At the end of the day, I’m a stakeholder. So for my very own site, I wanted to hire a great designer: Elliot Jay Stocks, a UK designer who is working with me on a couple of commercial projects (He’s something of a beer connoisseur, too — you’ve gotta respect that!)
I wanted to share a couple of notes about Elliot’s design that you might find useful. First and foremost, I think you will find the design lovely and the experience interesting in all browsers, but for the most posh, modern web design look and feel, check it out in Safari. It’s subtle, but the difference is really nice. Compare it to Firefox, particularly if you are on a version of Firefox before 3.5.x.
A couple of the CSS3 differences that make the design really sell itself in Safari particularly well are to do with Safari’s @font-face implementation, as well as CSS Transitions. You can read more about the upcoming CSS3 @font-face implementation over here. Safari does a good job of rendering fonts that are added to the browser via CSS3 rules, giving my header area a nice, branded look, without having to create an image, using sIFR, or worse. Go ahead – highlight with your mouse my name at the top of the page- it’s text being style purely via CSS. Sexy! Of course, if a browser does not support this functionality, it degrades gracefully to a system font they have available to them… it just doesn’t look quite as hot as it could if they would upgrade to a better browser. The other primary difference is with Safari’s rendering of new CSS3 rules for transitions. In Safari, when you hover over a div, for example, you’ll see some smooth transitioning to a hover state in the browser. In Firefox, you will just see a quick, traditional hover state change. No harm done if you don’t have Safari – it degrades to older browsers just fine, as well, and Firefox should support this very shortly. You can read a little more on CSS3 Transitions over here.
This website runs on WordPress. Yes, yes, I realize I am a huge supporter of the Drupal development and Drupal Design community, but part of doing business is choosing the right tool for the job. For this website, WordPress happens to be the perfect choice.
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Christopher For Sale
If you can’t sell yourself you can’t sell anything…
This is not a blog about self-help drivel, salesmanship, tired social networking gimmickry, marketing, or even multi-level marketing schemes. No, I’m not selling frickin’ Amway. No, I am not religious. In fact, I’m whatever the opposite of Mormon is. Maybe. Maybe I’m the opposite of whatever Scientology is? Wait, no, I’m the opposite of the sum of whatever Mormon plus Scientology is, where the sum of those religions equals a negative number.
Mormonism = x, Scientology =y, and is always a -1(x+y) value, therefore, Christopher = -1 [-1(x+y)]
Maybe.
“Me for sale” is an intentional misnomer. I’m not selling you anything, really. I’m simply of the opinion that everyone seriously involved in business online needs their own quiet (or noisy) corner of the web where people can get to know them better. Times and paradigms have changed. The traditional brick-and-mortar business owner would establish relationships and communicate who they are and what they are about by hanging out at chambers of commerce meetings, social organizations in their communities, et cetera. Today, our community is far too large and far too scattered to make that even remotely feasible. Voila! My new home…
What I will be doing… I will be sometimes talking about web development and business projects I am doing or I am involved in. (But it’s definitely not going to be all about business.) I will share ideas about life, philosophy, web design, music, our world, beer, wine, geeky stuff, interesting quotes, links, videos I like, words I like, things I’ve made like some of my photography, and things of that nature – probably many other things I have not considered yet. I’ll probably get a little saucy every now and then, as you do… I might write while intoxicated. No, I will definitely write while intoxicated. I might regret it later. I might not.
What I won’t be doing… I won’t be trying to advertise to you. Ever. All this site is about is allowing someone to get a slightly better idea of who I am.
About Christopher Calicott
He's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his wommmaaann.. Okay, well, that's not exactly true, but I don't have my own song (yet.)
Contact by email: purrin@binary.net
- Content © 2009 Christopher Calicott
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