Please enjoy a springtime mix featuring tracks from All Day I Dream, Shanti Radio Moscow, Tale & Tone, and others. Some deep house, some desert house, and lots of bright bells.
In the process of redesigning my site, I've been brushing up on my web typography skills. I've been following Matej Latin's Better Web Type email list, reading his book, and trying out interesting combos using Adobe Fonts based on what I've learned.
While digging around for examples from other designers, I came across 10 Dazzling Web Font Combinations from Stepto & Son. Their suggestions stand out because they featured standard fonts like Georgia and Myriad — fonts I rarely consider. It's good to revisit the standards, like how a sushi chef comes back to tamago again and again.
To visualize their combinations better, I created some quick layouts in slack based on a recent blog post. I can't install all of the fonts for obvious reasons, so instead I present screen captures of those layouts. I'm also including a few alternates that stood out.
Christina Wodtke, 2017
I used to be able to sketch really well in high school and college, but what I really dreamed of was cartooning. Years later I discovered Illustrator. My cartooning dreams came true and I never picked up a pencil to draw again.
Until now.
I'm planning to work as part of a design team whereby communicating ideas requires quick sketches, mock-ups, and white boarding. Fortunately I came across this gem of a book. It walks you though steps, from simple lines and geometric shapes to text & lettering, drawing basics, and building a library of design ideas. Very nice.
For a recent exercise, I messed around with shared element transitions in Android. This type transition is useful for selecting an image from one view that will be shown in another.
Decks and speakers are the building blocks of playing out and there’s plenty of discussion about what’s best for each. Generally overlooked however is the stuff in the middle: signal processing components that transform the sound coming from the mixer to the speakers.
With the right equipment it’s very easy to get big sound in any setting, even when you’re using a small sound system.
I updated my permalink urls today. Previously my site used /blog/year/post-name, but now it will use /category/post-name.
Why the change? A long time ago I decided to hard-code the word "blog" into the site permalink, which was fine for blog posts. But years later, when I needed to add a new portfolio, it caused my projects to be listed under /blog/work instead of just /work.
I mostly get inbound links for Android / UX development and Digital DJing tips. This url change shouldn't be too disruptive to those readers because most of those posts are simply old or outdated. I've left those two categories in the main menu for the time being to make it easy to relocate those posts.
[Update: I also changed "Android Dev Tips" to "UX Development" since that's my area of expertise.]
My apologies for the minor hassle. Moving forward, I expect there will be far more use for my posts in the future due to upcoming changes to my site.