I put this together more than two months ago now, but I didn't have a reliable delivery system for it. It's huge, of course, and I thought better of making it all available as one giant zip file. Who wants to wait for a download of 230 megs of something that's by just... some guy? Presumptuous, that.

So instead, a flash player. The one I used is the free and open source xspf player, because I'm cheap and didn't want to pay for the easier and more customizable Wimpy player. In the end, it makes little difference. So without further adieu.

Desperate and Devout - a 2008 mix
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I believe I have decided that this will be my official photo for the winter of 2008-2009.

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GIMP is the rather unfortunate name of the photo editor that comes with many Linux distributions (and, obviously, is free to download for any Linux distro), and has many of the same functions as Photoshop. I run two machines -- an iMac with a proper, respectable copy of Adobe CS3 installed, and a PC with Linux. (Each of which also boots into Windows XP, but that's another entry.) I have not learned the ins and outs of GIMP the way I have of Photoshop, since I have only been using it for a year and a half or so, but for certain filters and effects, I have come to depend on it. The "Colorize" function, for instance, has no easy analog in Photoshop, and is fantastic for turning any picture into a monochrome image with the hue of your choice.

I discovered the power of the "Equalize" function almost by accident. I was in Houston for the Christmas holiday, and went out with the small camera I brought, an aging Canon Powershot A510, to the grounds near St. Thomas University that include the Menil Collection, the Cy Twombley Gallery, and (maybe most notably) the Rothko Chapel. I took many dozens of pictures. Trouble is, the entire time I had my camera on the wrong white balance setting. I'd been taking pics indoors the night before, and had set the white balance to "tungsten," which adds a great wash of blue over everything to compensate for the very orange tungsten bulb light.

So I got home and found that I had a lot of photos that looked almost as if they had been taken underwater. So I started playing with filters. As the one laptop I had with me was running Ubuntu Linux, I started there. I quickly discovered that using the "Equalize" filter on them yielded results that were... well... stunning. Better than I could have planned.

It seems like a mistake worth making again.

It's incredible how any person, randomly, can end up seeping into the cracks of the internet and staying there forever. I'm not a great example, because I actively seek out an internet presence, but that's not how this got there. I was accosted on the street and handed a notepad to answer one obvious question and two irrelevant ones -- so irrelevant that they feel strained. So strained that they smell from a mile away like a spankin' new web magazine that can't quite find enough content. Anyway.

I had nothing, so I quoted Watchmen. (By the way, I have been properly shaven for several years now.)

Happy Holidays from here in wonderland.

For a couple-few years now, I have been counting Otl Aicher's rotis among my favorite typefaces, in particular the thin sans-serif font. I had also been spelling it with an initial capital letter, but I broke that habit. As Wikipedia explains: "The font's name is written in minuscules, since Aicher thought of capital letters as a sign of hierarchy and oppression." I love that. Being afraid of the hierarchy and oppression of capital letters is kind of delightfully twisted. Almost morbid.*

But I cut designers a lot of slack for being a bit nutty, particularly if they're as formative and incorrigibly German as Aicher. I don't know first-hand, but I imagine living under Nazi rule could make a man irrationally suspicious of hierarchy and oppression. And at any rate, rotis (designed 1988) is hugely popular and can be seen everywhere, provided you are in Germany.

So I'd been wanting to use rotis light in the logo of this page since a few redesigns ago, but I could never quite make it fit. The key bit of inspiration (or outright theft) this time around was Aicher's book typographie (also from 1988), a classic of instruction on the subject, as well as a prime example of its practical application.

The most immediately striking element in its design is its heavy use of white space. I am a big booster of white space, and have spent a lot of time talking with employers, clients, and even other designers about its importance, not only as a visual element but as an agent of clarity and meaning within a design. This new blog design is at least partly spite against anyone who imagines they are allergic to white space. (Imagine me rubbing my hands together and cackling evilly, like Renfield.) It may also very well break the rule that you should not try to make new media look like old media, but hopefully not to the point that it's outright appalling. (Though I'm not ruling that out as a possible reaction.)

I'd love to have followed Aicher's type design completely and used rotis serif as body text, but of course that won't fly for a lot of reasons, so I dropped back to two of my other favorite fonts, both of them Microsoft-funded creations. The body text is Euphemia (or Euphemia UCAS), which you already have on your machine if you are running Windows Vista or OS X, and I believe comes with distributions of Microsoft Office as well, so you may already have it on Windows XP. If you don't have Euphemia, by all means, get it. It's free, and Tiro Typeworks keeps up with the latest versions of it and many other fonts. (If you don't have it, you'll see the old standby Geneva on Mac, which is a good-enough stand-in, and the old system font Tahoma on Windows, which is quite a different animal, but I was stumped at thinking of a standard Windows font that made a good proxy. )

The headers, links, and other smaller elements are Corbel, which is currently the Windows Vista system font, and one I swear by as a screen font. (It's not free, sadly, but get it anyway.) I have heard people compare it to Lucida, the OS X system font, with perhaps the intimation that Microsoft is just ripping off Mac again. True, they are both Humanist sans-serif typefaces, but so are all good screen fonts, and the MS hate is nothing but sour grapes in this case. Here's an open secret: the Microsoft foundries are very, very good at what they do, and Corbel is an especially well-made typeface. Lately I have even started using the default Vista monospace font, Consolas (not too clever a name, but ok), in my Terminal program on my Mac. Readability trumps all, but a little flair never hurt anybody.

I have tested the layout and fonts on everything common I can think of -- all the usual browsers available on OS X, Vista, XP, and Ubuntu -- and it looks fine on anything newer than IE6. (There is still work to be done for IE6 viewers. Hold on, I'm comin'.) But I can never know what everyone is seeing, and breaking away from the half dozen solidly reliable screen fonts on this typographic nightmare we call the internets is always a sketchy proposition. So feel free to let me know if anything looks just plain wrong to you.

*A friend who is a native speaker of German tells me that capitalization in German is actually kind of oppressive. All nouns. "All nouns?," I said. "No way." "Oh yes," he said.

When I first moved to Chicago, I was unreasonably excited about snow. Everyone from back home in Texas told me I would get sick of snow. That's both true and very much missing the point. Of course I complain now, after five winters here. By around the middle of February, there is little to love about the mess and the general ick that city snow causes. You'd be a fool to love a pile of snow that's been sitting next to a bus stop for a month, black from exhaust and full of cigarette butts. Or an intersection that has become impassable on foot because of a sea of slush. No, of course you get sick of that.

What I never get sick of is the changing of seasons. It's not the cold or the short days that I love so much, though I do have a soft spot for sweaters and scarves, and -- because I was never much of an outdoorsy person -- I relish the time of year when there is every good excuse to not go outside. And I do enjoy the feeling of being bundled up and cozy against weather outside that can be truly frightful. But none of those things are the main reason I love winter, and the coming of winter, and the first snow. It's the change. It's not a change I grew up with, and I don't ever get tired of it.

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Voice actor Don LaFontaine died on Monday. He was the man known to American moviegoers as the "In a world" guy. He claims to have invented the phrase, though authorship of something so mundane is very difficult to prove. And to complicate matters further, there's also Hal Douglas, who, confusingly enough, is also known to American moviegoers as the "In a world" guy. The trouble is, when they put on their gravelly, bass-heavy, oh-so-ominous movie trailer voices, they are difficult to tell apart. I've watched dozens of old movie trailers dating back dozens of years, so I've gotten better at it, but not many people pay that kind of attention to who's doing the voice over. Particularly as they both got older, they began to sound more and more alike.

For example, the trailer for the original The Terminator is classic LaFontaine. The beginning words, "In this city," while not exactly "In a world," would sound just as hokey in a preview today:

Hal Douglas has a bit more rasp and a bit more bass in his voice, and to younger moviegoers (and even gamers) is probably the more instantly recognizable voice. You even get to see what he looks like in this classic and very funny anti-trailer for the Jerry Seinfeld movie Comedian:

LaFontaine was in the business first, and was generally thought of as the king of the movie trailer, but these two men have exactly the same job. Perhaps it is the plight of the voice-over actor that if they do their job well, no one gives any thought to who they are or to the nuances of their timbre.

Of course, even though these two generally get the more menacing voice overs, they are not alone in the business. Check out this skit, from the beginning of some awards show that no one ever watches featuring LaFontaine and four other voices that you can't help but know by heart. (I especially like the gag with the Disney guy in his gay yellow sweater.) Hal Douglas is on the phone for a brief moment in the skit, and LaFontaine dismisses him, in what seems like a joking nod to some rivalry.

At least from now on, there will be no mystery as to who is voicing the trailer for that new thriller, because one of them is dead. RIP Don LaFontaine.

As I am not a band, I will now leave MySpace to the people it was originally intended for -- bands. I never cared much for it, anyway, and my profile has been neglected for so long it's getting embarrassing. Only one thing to do with it, and it's the same sad thing they had to do with Ol' Yeller.

In memoriam, there's this video, which has sat under my "About Me" header for months, and is still one of the best things I've ever seen on YouTube. (Favorite line: "Yeah, I got a kid.") And it's even local.

I've always loved art deco design, for the angular shapes and the sharp contrasts, but most of all for the colors. They seem unique to me in any art movement of the 20th century. Last time I did this whole thing, I just started with a hazy vagueness (which turned out ok, surprisingly!), but this time I started with a famous painting by Tamara de Lempicka called "Young Girl with Gloves." From there I had to work backwards towards something that would actually make a usable interface. Ain't that just always the way.

After resisting the temptation to make another dark, "inverse" theme (it's always there with me, especially in the middle of the night), I went with a fairly neutral palette, the base color having perhaps a half-hint of green, but mainly a medium-light grey, highlighted with gold and black.

Now, a word about "gold." I always thought it was a color. I was surprised and possibly enlightened to discover that... it's not. Red and green and blue are colors, they happen all on their own and stand firm in any light, but something like "gold" is so dependent on the colors near to it, and perhaps even the shapes and context it's put into, that it can't be called a color anymore than you can call "puke" a color. Gold is an emotion, and at its very best it's an event. If that sounds obvious, well, it does to me too, now that I see it. Ain't that just always the way.

Aaaanyway. The icons are very different than the ones in the last theme I put out, even though they're based on the same basic stuff. The folders (very dominant in any desktop's color scheme) are a lipstick shade of rose, and many of the basic colors of other icons have been changed, enhanced, or the icons completely redrawn and reworked.

Before you install any of this, make sure you have the latest gnome themes:

Do that first, and the "themes" package should drag and drop nicely. The icons should install just as easily, the wallpaper as always is at your discretion, and the login theme (labelled "Deco-gdm-login.tar.gz") should be extracted and moved by the root user to /usr/share/gdm/themes.

And then (I have found no way to make this one-step, unfortunately), you have to go to System > Administration > Login Window, choose the "Local" tab, then choose the theme that you just plopped into the "/usr/share/gdm/themes" folder. The theme ought to show up immediately, even without restarting or logging out. (If it doesn't show up, try restarting or logging out. Heh.) Make sure you also choose "Themed" and "Selected Only" from the two dropdown menus at the top of the window, respectively. The process is not as pretty as it should be, I know. But if it was, it would be called Apple and it wouldn't be free. It also wouldn't be this customizable, so it's kind of a wash.

Anyway, here you go.

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Sample: Icons

Download

Complete package (12.0MB)

Gtk theme only (491 bytes)

Icons only (4.5MB)

Wallpapers only (3.6MB)