PBS arts presents Type.
H & FJ: “Typefaces are not toys they’re tools.”
Paula Scher: “Words have meaning and type has spirit. And the combination is spectacular.”
The work of David Pearson. Not too long ago, Jamie mentioned to me how cool it would be to get to design book covers. Indeed. He doesn’t illustrate all of them, but he does most of the time.
Oh, design is about everything but design, so all this other stuff. Design exists for food and culture and linguistics and dog walkers and the city and agile programming methods and the federal deficit and the Hubble telescope.” Life is much happier once you see design as a cultural vessel, and realize it’s more productive and more nourishing to focus on the culture than the vessel. It’s a great lesson in humility. Forget that designer’s ego stuff: we’re servants.
Another good one from that Frank Chimero interview.
Micah suggested I make some sort of custom ligature for my logotype. Good idea!
The font is Darjeeling. I added the curl on the C, also the R and K swashes. Cause I love swashes.
The New Hadilaksono or: How I Stop Kvetching and Learn to Love CSS-ing
Well, maybe love is too strong of a word. Even my dog Miles who is the most adorable thing living in my house right now, I only like, a lot.
I have a confession to make, for the longest time I hated web design. Let me explain. I like designing for the web, I shine when it’s time to make logos or illustrations or page mockups, but when it comes to turning a photoshop mockup into a live functioning site, well, it just makes my heart drop. Over the years I thought myself a little bit of html/cssing, I know enough to be competent when talking about it, but I never really stuck to it enough to where I can build a whole site on my own. I was always more concern about designing good mockup than about learning how to build it.
Then recently, I finally decided that I need to step up to the plate, knowing how to design mockups and not knowing how to build them is like designing blindly. As Aza Raskin mentions in his article So You Want To Be A Designer: Top 5 List
” Learn to Program, Even If Poorly. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the implementers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic.”
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m learning to be a mediocre coder so I can be a better designer. I don’t intend to be a web designer, even at A Good Company, which has an exclusively web-based projects, we pride ourselves on being thinkers first and “web-designers” second. The way I see it, being a technically savvy designer is like having a better way of getting your Good Ideas across, to do that, first you must have good ideas.
So it’s safe to say that I would never be as good as Meagan Fisher or Kevin Burg, or other talented web folks out there, but if I know how to code just enough so that I can make what I want to make, that’s good enough for me.
And what I wanted to make was a simple and well integrated website, with good typography, and I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome. So, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working feverishly on redoing my website. I scraped everything and started from scratch. I figure with the new direction my life is taking, personal and work-wise (since they’re so closely intertwined), it’s time for Hadilaksono to get a new branding. And after some intense css/html-learnin’, and some trouble-shooting help from Micah (as always), it’s finally ready!
I’m using A Good Portfolio to run the Work section and Tumblr for the Blog. Tumblr, because that’s where my blog lives, and A Good Portofolio because I wanted my Work section to be easily updatable, without me having to go and change the html manually every time I add new work.
There’s a related article detailing the technical how-to’s that I learned from the making of the site. It’s pretty handy if you’re thinking of using A Good Portfolio for you website.
Now go and check out the new and improved Caroline Hadilaksono!
f8 Revisited
I was doing some reasearch for a current client project and somehow (re)ran into this post about the f8 Conference. Bernard Barry is the art director for the project, not only directing though. I think what I’m most impressed with is by how much he got his hands dirty making everything himself, literally by hand sometimes, from coding those graphs that are projected on the walls using Processing, to building a bunch of tables for the event, from scratch using plywood, even silkscreening all sorts of signage for the event.
No matter how people feel about Facebook, you have to hand it to them that they know what they’re doing, they do it well, and they treat their people well.
