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I don’t even know what that is
I read something about a 20 million dollar loss
Whose loss? How does one even lose 20 mill?

I spend the next 20 minutes looking for a new car
In the classifieds, and land on one like new
Kelly green
Olds, only 40k and just inspected

I call the number, Al answers
This is Al
Hi, can I see the olds?
Who is this? Jerry?
And I hang up

I settle on an editorial, someone thinks the war on milk needs to end

is falling outside my Lyons office window.

 

We’re in an odd place with the whole typography thing.

Most people who look at computers on a daily basis have an idea of what fonts are. They just have no idea about how beautiful they can be.

The reason is that screens suck. They are either too low resolution (we can see the pixels) or too tiny (phones). And everyone reads screens nowadays, not paper.

Screens have sucked forever. Just that word, “screen“, is nasty. It’s like a mesh, or a veil; something you have to look through to see the real thing.

If you want a good screen, you’d better be rich. Which is why typography as an artform still only exists in print. If we remove the barrier of location, which the screen claims to have done, artwork should be look the same to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Put the same printed piece in someone’s hands, regardless of this restriction, and she will see the same thing. Stand in front of a painting, sculpture, heck–even digital art, and you see the same thing as anyone else in the gallery. Share a link to your design on behance, dribbble, or your website? Forget it. Everyone’s seeing something different, and most of them are seeing garbage.

Print is inherently ubiquitous. Physical location and space is definable. Screen is nowhere near being able to make the same claim. Screens suck, and it’s pointless to use it as a forum to discuss typographic merit of any design until screens get better, way better.

-learn base

-learn python

Hoping to find:

• Renaming blocks (or at least groups)
  • Yes!
• Better font management
  • Yes!
• Native lightbox
  • wawa
• Styling links
  • wawa

Have to say this was my best WC yet. First the bad:

• I left my phone on the beach the first day. Thankfully someone found it and called my hotel, but I spent the whole evening trekking it across SF getting it back.
• I wanted soo bad to take SouthWestern up on a delay for travel voucher, but just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Next time!
• I forgot my business cards.
• I forgot my laptop power cord.
• I brought shorts.
• I totally screwed up my travel plans by not extending my stay through Sunday, and thus missing out on contributor day. What is wrong with me? This was by far the biggest screw-up of the trip.

Now the good:

• I met some really great people: Brad Thomason, Robert Rusnack and Vincent Burkhead, Vijay Vasu, K. Adam White, and many more; got to see Matt Mullenweg and too many Automatticians to list, and generally be around the most awesome people in the world.
• I was happy to see that Yuri Victor uses  timeline.js and the JSON API to convert WP posts to a timeline for the Washington Post. I did  an entire project on this last summer (password there is 123fh321)
• I thoroughly enjoyed Siobhan McKeown and Mika Epstein’s talks.
• I got to do a lot of sketching.
• I ate really good Mexican almost every day.
• The flight was absolute cake, and I got halfway through World War Z.
• I got a shout-out from the grand wizard himself, Matt Mullenweg (jump ahead to around 36:00)

A few thoughts:

• It was really well organized.
• The amount of love for and pride in people’s connection with WP was everywhere. It’s just amazing to see a piece of technology have such a strong connection with the people who use it.
• The sponsors were almost all hosting companies. Not that I have anything against it, but I would like to see more premium plugins sponsoring. Gravity Forms, iThemes, you heard me!
• The Mosser Hotel is a great little place to stay, and half the price of anything around. Yeah, you have to share a bath and toilet with your floor, but c’mon people, stop being so pampered!
• Matt Mullenweg is truly an amazing speaker. The challenge of putting a year’s worth of full-throttle development of one of the fastest growing technologies on the planet into a one hour presentation must be daunting. But he pulls it off every time. It’s fun to try and read into some of the stuff he says.

Maybe the most loaded topic was on WordPress as an app framework. WP as a foundation to build on is a controversial topic, and faces a ton of skepticism and criticism. WordPress will outgrow itself, it’s getting too big, it’s losing touch with the simplicity of just writing, etc. are all sentiments that seem to be all the rage these days, but it’s hard to go to one of these giant WordCamps and not feel confident that the WP world will always remain a truly user-focused, community-driven, open source, and free.

 

In the beginning, format was king. The mere fact that we were reading something on the web made it important. It had somehow come to occupy this new medium, which in itself was novel and beautiful and confusing. Whoever put it there had to be smart, and therefore the content as well.

Then, at some point, maybe the early 2000’s, content became king. Your format is getting in the way of our content, we’d say. Enough of the tables, the flash, the jpeg-rendered text. Let us read <pre> formatted courier and be fulfilled.

Then context became king; it was more important where, when, and how readers got the content than what the content actually was. Can I read it on my iWatch? Because that’s how I read stuff nowadays. Is it RTL compatible? Pft, how dare we ignore half the world (if not more)’s readership.

Contrast is next. It’s all we have left. Is it different than what I’ve seen before? Does it stand out? In my daily sea-of-noise, what clambers to the surface, bobbing aggressively for attention like some snagged snapper float? That’s what I’ll read.