For some, a personal website is the first introduction to a person. For others, it is a digital reflection of the person they already know. But no matter who the audience is, one’s personal website reflects the image they want to project to the world. And no matter who the audience is, they’re probably seeing that website from their cell phone. So it better be ready.
(That was a preview of my “Principles of Responsive Web Design” strategic document. Read the full thing here.)
After a year of copy editing and a semester spent editing the opinion pages of the Trinitonian — Trinity University’s sole source of independent, hyperlocal student journalism — I’d learned much about typographic design principles through osmosis. But it wasn’t until my year as editor-in-chief that I seriously dedicated myself to better understanding the foundations of good page and web design.
Dr. Melissa McMullen, assistant professor of communication at Trinity, and Ina Saltz’s “Graphic Design Foundations: Typography” series on Lynda.com acquainted me with the skills and vocabulary of quality typography, and greatly improved my ability to convey meaning through the written word with as much impact as possible.
I didn’t catch South by Southwest 2018 this year, but the festival archives the panels and lectures on YouTube, so I spent a few hours watching the videos that caught my eye. Naturally, that short playlist included two discussions on journalism, one between Jeff Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic and the other a presentation by Vox co-founder Ezra Klein. Finally, I waded into unknown territory and braved strange buzzwords: I watched a bunch of investors and lawyers discuss blockchain startups.
Continue reading All of the Panels, None of the Crowds: My (Virtual) SXSW 2018
TO: Abbie Hoffman
FROM: Daniel Conrad
DATE: 16 April, 2018
SUBJECT: Finalizing the Hacker Cafe website
Mr. Hoffman,
It is my pleasure to share with you our finished mock-up of the Hacker Cafe website. We hope you will agree that this design combines your company’s desire for a “simple and clean” modernism with bold use of color and typographic hierarchy.
I’ve held onto a personal domain name via Google Domains since 2016, but hadn’t done too much with it since the purchase. (Should’ve bought daniel.zone before some other guy nabbed it.) I’ve also held onto an old ASUS laptop, which I used for high-school debate tournaments before graduating and going to Trinity University in San Antonio. Until a few weeks ago, it was gathering dust at my old home.
Now my home router is taking all HTTP traffic sent to the URL “dconrad.me” and redirecting it toward that laptop, which serves a simple portfolio page. Simple as it is, that took a long time to get running right.
I’ve had the good fortune of taking a Pre-AP Computer Science class in high school and a demanding, fast-paced Principles of Computer Science course at Trinity, so by now I find many of the basic aspects of programming fairly intuitive. But until February 2018, I hadn’t experimented with Python since following along with a series of blog posts about a father who taught his six-year-old son how to make games in the language.
Continue reading Scripts and Snakes: Learning Python through Codecademy
The language of a legal document or scientific textbook may impress or even intimidate us because we do not see how the language got there in the first place. The text does not allow the reader to see how the facts it contains were selected, what was excluded, why these facts were organized in this particular way, what assumptions governed this process, what forms of work went into the making of the text, and how all of this might have been different. Part of the power of such texts thus lies in their suppression of what might be called their modes of production, how they got to be what they are; in this sense, they have a curious resemblance to the life of the human ego, which thrives by repressing the process of its own making.
All this talk is getting me downNothing’s making sense in my brainI’m moving words across the terrainTrying hard to fix to the pageI’m wedded to the thought that we cameOnly to discover our namesAnd blow a horn of love in refrainAnd watch things drop downAnd watch things drop down
From Part III of “The Tower”:
Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come—The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath—
Seem but the clouds of the skyWhen the horizon fades,
Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.
— William Butler Yeats
I imagine the gracious, benevolent ritual of Death…
Becky Cloonan has illustrated Deafheaven’s “Gifts for the Earth”; check the image after the jump.
daniel conrad 