you know, there’s this weird feeling i get when one of my friends doesn’t update their site for days at a time…kinda ominous. it’s like a site has become a vital mode of communication, and by not actually saying anything, i can tell that friend is actually thinking very, very intently. kinda of like when someone’s staring off into space in the middle of a conversation. you know?
that’s what’s been going on here. so i should just write this out while i’m thinking about it.
i’m abandoning movable type as the engine that runs this site (and, in fact, all my sites). the reason for this is not their licensing announcement, which drove a few users to hysterical fits, but the simple opinion that i think they’re growing too quickly to service their product well. i don’t resent the company at all for instituting a paid license—in fact, i applaud that. i actually moved to a platform that’s also under a paid license. that was never my issue.
the licensing of movable type seemed like it should have been fairly straightforward—but its implementation was so flawed in such obvious ways that i was simply alarmed. the miscommunication and resulting PR disaster was so great that i began to think that six apart could be on a very wrong commercial path. i had no objection to their licensing—i objected to their miscommunication. no matter how good your work is, if you miscommunicate with your clientele, you’re dead in the water. i know this firsthand.
the mess also exacerbated my longest frustration: an inherent implication that blogging is really the only form of content management a small publisher needs. this is not so, and that line of thought is shortsighted and market-driven. over the past year, i’ve found myself hacking movable type apart to get around its adherence to linear, time-based entries as a driving principle. i’d rather not work that way.
maybe it’s that i’m much less of a programmer than other designers working online (my roots are, after all, in traditional media, not the web, since i’ve been working commerically since 1993). maybe it’s just that i’m sick to death of movable type since su and i work with it every day for our gawker media pieces.
i’m testing out a piece of software called expression engine right now. it’s a solid product, from what i can so far tell. the tag syntax for displaying my entries has been much easier to learn than movable type was upon first glance. the documentation is much better than movable type’s. one of my biggest gripe with MT was that the documentation of its tags was completely confounding.
right now, i’m in the midst of importing all of my work from movable type (and some previous work from greymatter, a platform upon which i ran a few years ago) into ee, correcting now-invalid links, and i have to say: it’s been ridiculously easy. many thanks to the folks at pmachine for allowing me a developer’s license and thorough, friendly support. so if i seem silent from the outside, there’s really quite a bit going on.
we’re launching a lot of new work through gawker media on monday. keep your eyes peeled.
su and i will be in new york from october 3 to october 9. specifically, we’re coming in for a party on the 4th and we’ll be working with kinja in the meatpacking district for the week. if anyone wants to get together, pretty’s phone is always on.
nick’s officially announced today’s launching projects.
enjoy. su and i have enjoyed designing them: kotaku, screenhead, and jalopnik.
also, i’d like to announce, with the design of jalopnik, milan’s addition to the house of pretty. milan created jalopnik’s siganture typography, i created kotaku’s and su created screenhead’s.
milan is a favorite young designer of mine. he’s currently working from orlando, and hails from fort lauderdale, where he and i met (actually, it was online) when he was all of sixteen.
milan is a typographer bar none. i’ve wanted to work with him for years, but now is the first time pretty’s grown enough of a capacity to handle work from new artists. look for more from milan soon.
so ever since we launched screenhead last week, denton has been forwarding message after message of people whining, “eeeeew grody. you’re making me puuuuuke. i haaaaaaate that picture,” which was exactly my point. and you know what? it takes a long frigging time to make someone look that nasty.
so here’s how i made the poor guy.
step one: start with a stock photograph of a guy who’s kind of a ‘tater. my apologies, whoever he is.
step two: basic retouch to make the skin tones smoother and easier to work with. pluck eyebrows, remove blackheads. yick. funny thing is you can’t really see any difference whatsoever unless you stack it directly on top of the original.
step three: duplicate right eye in three different sections (top lid and brow, eyeball, lower lid and socket), then carefully scale and reshape each piece of the eye into a larger socket (which will be rounder than the original, hence the three sections). erase carefully into the skin tones at the edges of the sections to blend everything together. using a fine brush and four different haircolors, paint in extensions to the existing eyebrow so that it matches the contour of the new socket. realize you have to do it all again and cry a little.
step four: after tears have dried, sample skin on left carefully into a new cheekbone matching the larger eye socket form, extend the eyebrow, remove the original eye and re-shape it into a more bulbous form. realize you’re failing miserably because his eye is being stretched so much it’s getting mushy and cry more.
step five: paint and re-shape eyes until they actually match in scale, scream in exasperation, stomp out of the house, get incredibly drunk at a stupid industrial club that you don’t like anyway because most of the industrial and goth twits these days are so straight off the rack from hot topic, you know? wake up the next morning with a huge hangover, then start rolling that stone up the hill again. paint into the chin area because now his face looks completely out of whack, realize you’ve accidentally erased into the actual chin and screwed it all up again, throw laptop, stamp your little feets, get drunk again (but at a better bar this time), then pass out.
step six: wake up, puke twice, paste on a new chin from the original photograph. go back to bed for two days. refuse to speak to anyone.
step seven: re-shape mouth to be more frog-like, narrow back of neck for that sassy hydroencephalitic look all the chicks dig so much, add shadows around contours, come to your senses and render fake eyeballs in cinema 4D and composite under original eyelids.
final step: add redness, paint veins, add highlights, and generally make his eyes look as large, wet and stupid as you can muster. add shadows under the nose to simulate sunken sockets. stand back, admire your work and go “ew.” after a quick alt from denton (“can you open his mouth a little? he looks entirely too cognizant”), she’s all done and ready to gross your patrons right the hell out. bon appetit!
this printing screwup on a michigan absentee ballot could possibly be a digital fake…but it seems wisest to assume it’s actually an error until completely sorted out.
itc, who’s best known in designer circles for releasing horrible typography to the public, has mysteriously come to their senses and released a real beauty called “tyke.” it’s a modernization of ideas used for cooper black, and i kinda love it. but my favorite cooper reconstruction is still oz by patrick giasson, which is a weird little po-mo turn on cooper—it’s actually derived from the recuts used on the archie series of comics which is so typogrphically meta my head exploded when patrick told me where he’d gotten his inspiration.
“screams then silence” is the headline the chicago tribune’s assigned to a story about a tour bus flipping. really, people. can we make chicago’s leading daily a little trashier than fox news, please? i mean, don’t worry about making for an emotional play or anything. you guy are being far too objective. we need to juice it up a little. ‘kay? thanks.
so in case any of you read gawker while you eat your morning wheaties like i do, you’ve noticed it’s gone. why, you ask? fantastic question. the answer is that network solutions, best known for fucking up peoples’ domain registration, has fucked up our domain registration. if you need to see gawker, use this url: http://67.18.39.132/
apparently someone (*cough*choire!*cough*) fucked up a credit card number in a web-based transaction a while back, and instead of actually notifying us about the problem, netsol decided to simply let it lie there like a ticking time bomb…’cause that’s more fun. no service call, no nothing. so if you deal with netsol on a regular basis, you’ve been warned. their customer service totally fucking sucks. and while they correct their little oopsie, we’re hemorrhaging cash like a goddamned zeppelin with a slow leak. nice!
hey guys! guess what! you know those jokes about the bush twins? and how like if you’re not a bush girl it means you’ve got a brazilian wax? it’s not fucking funny the fiftieth time. love ya!
you know, i never thought i’d see a single thing about my design anywhere near the new yorker, much less packaging for a decaying porn film. but you know what? that’s okay. i don’t get it at all, but it’s okay.
you know, sometimes all it takes is a good cut and color to change things up. but in my case, it took a lot more. this was one of those “trash the house” kind of moments: this site is brand new, for the first time since 2001. here’s what’s changed.
the site has been completely rebuilt on a different publishing platform entirely. i began by ditching movable type for reasons bitched’n’moaned about previously, and replacing it with a clean installation of expression engine.
secondly, the site is entirely written in css, which is a new skill for me. when i began my creative direction stint in the dot com years, i stopped learning new technology, which mean that i stopped writing valid code. this is a big step for me.
third: i can finally use typography on the web which is just as ornate as that which i make in print. if you don’t have flash installed in your browser you’ll be seeing straight text headlines, but if you do have flash…nuch nicer. this is a fantastic improvement on the state of web-based typography, and one i’ve been impelmenting on almost every new gawker media site. learn more from its author, mike richardson.
finally, i folded the longer journal-like entries (previously called “bitch, bitch, bitch”) and the blog (formerly called “lost”) into a single publication, which can be separated by category (not right now, but it will be a capability as soon as i get all my internal links fixed). this is probably not important to anyone but me, but it knocks down an important barrier as far as i’m concerned.
..and so can you (10mb mpg file). come on people, what kind of pop trash do you think i am?
here’s an insightful response to what happened to ashlee simpson on saturday. it’s too bad everyone’s damning her so vocally for denying her mistake as vividly as she could; any of us would have done the same. imagine what you would do if you realized you’d just made a blunder in front of a few million people: refuse to believe it.
necromania, my latest project released, in the news. currently on reuters and cnn. rock!
so su and i were just down at belmont and clark. you know, where the fauxmeless goths hang out and distractedly ask for handouts. never mind that they’re wearing $200 transmuters. god. this guy walks into philly’s best and everything he was wearing was this iconic thing. so awesome. he was this weird disneyesque fake and perfect version of a hipster. severious.
it was what some personal shopper would do to you if you said “i wanna look totally billyburg.” it’s was all there, but it was so off the rack and completely wrong in that
1) ironic trucker cap with silhouette of big-titted trucker babe. (cap appeared to be about ten minutes old). worn rakishly to the side. he’d tucked his ear underneath. looked like it hurt, so he was suffering for his art. kinda cool. if you’re going to be pretentious, be pretentious.
2) grown out fauxhawk and that “ohmigod i spilled some bleach” bleach job that so many folks seem to enjoy right now. sometimes i guess it’s cute, but for the most part i’m like girl.
3) those hi-gloss shield sunglasses in gold metallic reflective lenses graduated to brown. i call them ParisVision. it was dark out, by the way.
4) orange, brown, and pink long sleeve glttery mess of a custo. even i, the tackiest creature on the planet, stopped wearing custo years ago. it’s just so obvious now. wanna be bourgeois-fashionable without trying? ten for ten bucks, low-rent. right here!
5) sweat bands, two. bright red. brand new.
5) carefully sanded diesel hiphuggers. it was so clear he’d worked his fingers to the bone to get his hems that worn.
6) those eighties boots. you know, the crappy pointed things you could buy at sears and everyone at school would make fun of you for having poor parents. and he was walking on the heels to make a lot of noise and you know he bought thsoe fuckers ‘cause they were loud.
but he was kinda majestic, you know? a walking icon of every failed cool thing, all at the same time, like going through your high school yearbook and being all “i remember when we wore our hair like that.” it was like he was 2001 to 2004. i was absolutely hypnotized.
and i woulda taken a picture. but i was too tired from a three hour conference call to come up with a good reason to whip out my phonecam. and i know he could tell i was laughing at him, so i would have needed a fucking amazing cover story. it takes a self-conscious murderous twat to know one. you know?
citizens of america’s urban centers, soon to be overrun with small-towners looking for a drunk bender, a quick lay, a forty-eight-hour debauch-a-thon… i salute you. i hear your weary cries. i honor your perseverence as this holiday weekend begins our end-of-the-year nightmare. may the buses from iowa break down en route, may the new jersey turnpike be closed, and may the flu season this year be epidemic. godspeed, proud urban soldiers.
