South by Southwest Interactive starts later this week, and it is shaping up to be a really nice event. Excitement is in the air as everybody at the office is packing and planning for Cogaoke, our yearly Karaoke party that we host at SXSW. In addition to that, there will be healthy representation from Happy Cog folk at panels too.
We F*cked Up: Happy Cog and Friends, Exploring Failures, Together hosted by Happy Cog elites Greg Storey, Greg Hoy, Kevin Hoffman as well as Wil Reynolds and Tracey Halvorsen.
ExpressionEngine 2.0: Total Domination hosted by, count them, four Happy Cog folk, including myself, Jenn Lukas, Mark Huot, and Ryan Irelan, alone with some handsome fella named Kenny Meyers who works at Virb.
Some other SXSW events I’m looking forward to are the Found Type Photo Walk and I hope to make it to the Kick-Ass premiere.
Best-laid plans aside, just like every year, I’m most looking forward to spending some quality time with people, having coffee and pints with friends, …
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This past summer and fall have involved some really fun projects launching. Some of these you know about, like the launch of Typedia and of course the move to Happy Cog was a pretty big project in an of itself. Some of the other projects I haven’t talked about much yet.
One of these was some of the ongoing work I’ve been doing with Mozilla. Just last week we launched the Mozilla Parks Page, which seeks to raise support for the Namoroka Park in Madagascar. I’m doing a few other mini-projects with Mozilla as well, including the Get Involved with Mozilla page and some more stuff in development. Mozilla is a great group to work with, and I’m just honored to be working with them.
One of my favorite bands of all time is They Might Be Giants. It’s hard for me to remember a time when I didn’t like these guys. So when Jason Santa Maria …
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I’m wrapping up a few different things at the office and making sure I get some quality family time in, as I’m heading out to San Francisco on Sunday to go to An Event Apart. I’m looking forward to both the talks that will be given, but also catching up with some people I haven’t seen in awhile.
Philadelphia has been great lately. The work at Happy Cog has been lots of fun the work-life balance has been pleasantly in check. We’re still hoping to get out more and see the city more. We have done an embarassingly small amount of tourism (I’m told there’s a bell here with a crack in it?).
I have more to write, and some projects that I wrapped up that I want to post about, but that will all have to wait. In the meantime, if you happen to be going to AEA as well, I look forward to seeing you there!
Congrats EllisLab. It has been a long time coming!
My good friend Vance Reeser is working on getting funding to do his next short film, “Lake Beast”. The concept for the film looks 100% awesome. Vance, while being an amazing artist and animator, is ultimately a very gifted storyteller. I implore you to pitch in a few dollars at his Kickstarter project site to help Lake Beast get made. He’s been posting lots of good stuff there in the “Updates” tab about his process and inspiration for the story.
Vance’s “Folio” site is well worth a visit too. I highly recommend watching The Bear Hunt and Deep Six.
I have the awesome opportunity to work with the Mozilla team in helping with their redesign. Happy Cog did all the initial work, and the new Mozilla.org launched just last night. Now I get a chance to work on designing and building a few areas of the site as well. My first blog post considering one of the new pages is up on the Redesign Mozilla site right now.
In 2007, at An Event Apart Chicago, Jason Santa Maria and I were talking over some pints about typography on the web, and in particular about how challenging it is to discover good typefaces. They are out there, but there’s no good way to find them! I said “we should make something to do that” and he said “I already have something in the works”.
A few months later, I found myself working on Typedia (which was already well underway) with a small army of fellow web designers & developers. Jason describes Typedia quite concisely:
At its simplest, Typedia is a shared encyclopedia of typefaces. Think of it as All Music or IMDb for type, but created and curated by everyone.
I remember back in college when I read The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. There was one recommendation in that book that really resonated with me: Consider the subject matter when choosing a typeface. For instance, if you are designing a book cover by a British author, consider using a typeface designed by a …
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If you notice anything different around here, it’s because I’m testing Typekit, an incredibly easy-to-use and powerful platform that let’s me serve up custom fonts on the web. This is a pretty huge deal, because until now we’ve had to use a variety of hacks and tricks to even come close to having custom typigraphy like this.
One extra awesome benefit of Typekit is that they host all the font files themselves, and I’m licensing them for this website. Typekit has an enormous growing list of fonts I can choose from, and I pay one low licensing fee to have access to everything. This. Is. Awesome.
If you’re using a current version of Firefox, Safari, Opera, or even Internet Explorer (not that I’d recommend that one, but seriously!) you should be able to see my custom typefaces in the headlines. There is one caveat, and that is that Typekit uses Javascript to handle the licensing of the fonts and include the proper code. This isn’t a hack, though. This is the real deal. It works and it works really well.
After three full years of working for myself, I’m now joining forces with Happy Cog. I’ve enjoyed working for myself so much over the years. It’s been exciting, successful and extremely fun. For those reasons, I never really looked for a “real job”. The idea didn’t appeal to me. I knew if someone came knocking and actually lured me away from this career, it would have to be someone special. So when they asked me if I wanted to move to Philadelphia and work at Happy Cog, I told myself that this time I should really consider it.
Let’s slow down for a sec. In fact, let’s rewind back to 2003 or so. I was living in Alaska and I started reading a book about web design by Happy Cog’s founder, Jeffrey Zeldman. You may have heard of it. I thought to myself, “This stuff makes sense and I should do it”. A few years later, I decide to quit my job and do this stuff full-time.
In 2007 I got a chance to meet …
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Be Good Not Bad is all about really good web design, based on the utmost respect for web standards, accessibility and respect for the user. Based in Denver, Colorado, Be Good Not Bad is run by Brian Warren, freelance designer, blogger, homebrewer and coffee nut.