CSSquirrel » Tidbits

Elsewhere: Making the Grade – A Primer on Linear Gradients

Kyle Weems — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:21:51 +0000

I’ve finally (albeit weeks later than intended) created a primer on linear gradients with CSS. It’s a shallow dip into the deep pool of CSS gradients, but it’ll help get you started on taking advantage of gradients with Webkit, Firefox and even Internet Explorer! (Yes, really.)

It’s posted over here at Mindfly Web Design Studio. If you’re curious about gradients but scared of the syntax, check it out.

Elsewhere: Mark Pilgrim’s “Tinkerer’s Sunset”

Kyle Weems — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:28:48 +0000

Usually when I mention Mark Pilgrim, it is with a dismayed tone that is meant to paint him as a dastardly villain who is elbow-deep in foul rituals meant to permanently stain the reputation of the HTML5 effort; an implication is made that he is resurrecting some great beast that will swallow the earth whole and enslave our souls.

What I’m saying is that, on average, I’m not a fan of his work.

However, his recent blog post “Tinkerer’s Sunset” clearly states the case of why the direction the iPad is moving the market is a sad affair. A man who learned his craft on an Apple IIe, he’s dismayed at the thought of the next generation of tinkerers, who will have to pay a fee or commit crimes in order to look under the hood of their own computers.

Many claim the iPad represents what the future of computing will look like: tailored, “safe” devices with little room for modification or customization (unless you plan on spending some time in court). Maybe that’s how it’ll be, and there’s little to be said or done. But Mark helps illustrate why that future will be a sad one. Go read his post.

What Do You Call Your Job?

Kyle Weems — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:48:57 +0000

At Mindfly, my official title is “Interactive Designer.” I’ve unofficially expanded it to “Interactive Designer & Humorist,” because my research has determined that you don’t need a special degree or oath to call yourself that. Which is more than can be said about my now-abandoned plan of adding “MD” to my title, which apparently offends members of the medical community and possibly constitutes a crime.

To complicate matters, my business cards says “Developer” on them. This is largely because I don’t do much conversing with clients, nor am I single, so I don’t have much reason to be handing them out to impress potential clients or dates. As such, I’ve had them for long before my title change. Mind you, my title change didn’t accompany any official change in tasks, merely a redefining what I do, which according to most of my co-workers is “get preachy.”

I’d tell them what to do less if they agreed with me more.

Anyhow, this whole rumination on job title spawned tiny thoughts that crept through my head asking “What do most people in the industry call themselves?” There’s plenty of discussions or surveys on the topic, such as this question from the Web Directions State of the Web 2008 survey, in which about half the respondents called themselves “developer”.

That doesn’t really answer my question. That’s what people call themselves, within the industry, in a survey of their peers. But what do you call yourself to the outside world? When I finally landed a gig in the industry (for which I am eternally thankful to Mindfly for) I called myself a “developer”. That confused most of the people I knew, so I upgraded it to “web developer.”

As expected, I then started fielding questions about how to fix their email problems or broken cable modems.

I experimented with “web designer”, but that didn’t do me much more good, other than being asked to draw things for people. So then I just started listing the technologies I used, which resulted in my friends’ eyes rolling back in their heads as they frothed at the mouth and started gnawing on their hands.

Taking a page from A List Apart, I’ve experimented with saying “I make websites,” which isn’t a title, but seems to at least get the gist across to people. Unfortunately, this almost always leads back to asking my particular role, so it’s a temporary reprieve at best.

At this point, I just tell people “I’m an Interactive Designer & Humorist,” which amusingly enough works better because it throws them off enough to ask what that means, to which I usually respond something like “In between a lot of tweeting I do some coding on websites,” which oddly satisfies most inquirers.

I’m not sure if this is a tactic that I should endorse for everyone, though. So I’m asking you all (and hoping for at least a few answers) what do you call yourself when talking to others, especially those outside the industry? What’s on your business cards? How well does that impart your actual job to the people that read it? Jason Santa Maria once talked about this from a designer angle in an article called Explain Yourself, which I think spawned a good discussion on the topic from a designer’s end. As a person that falls into the ‘code-monkey’ category, I’m wondering how you other developer/designer hybrids fill out your nametags.

Sweet WoW Machima – The Craft of War: BLIND

Kyle Weems — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:03:38 +0000

I’m not normally one to be reposting machima videos, but this is one of the better ones that I’ve seen in a long time, mainly because of all the custom skeletal animations being done (most WoW machimas use the standard animations throughout). It’s a great action scene focusing on the fight between two rogues. The creator (user percula on Vimeo) plans to do one showcasing each of the classes in WoW. I’m hoping she gets around to them all.

The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

File Under “Pointless But Entertaining”

Kyle Weems — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:59:31 +0000

An a capella Tribute to John Williams.

It’s worth noting that this is Karina’s fault for linking it to me. I’d put a medley like this on my iPod if it were in MP3 form.

Now It’s Easier Than Ever to Rickroll Your Online Friends

Kyle Weems — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:03:22 +0000

It’s a cliche as old as time, linking what sounds like an amazing video about this leaked game or that upcoming movie or those Swedish models, and instead the anxious web user finds themselves watching Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, a cheesey 80′s song. It’s so common a phenomenon, that it has it’s own name “rickrolling”.

Well, MTV finally pulled their head out of their bad reality-tv laden arse and created MTV Music, a music video site that makes it easier than ever to trick your friends into watching bad eighties rock.

As a teenager I was in a family that didn’t really encourage rock music, let alone have the spare funds to waste on cable television, so I missed out on a lot of common reference points for pop culture. Now no longer! I can go watch all the pink and neon blue videos of the past. Even better, I can embed these gems of the codpiece era in blog posts, making other people suffer with me (or unsubscribe from my blog, I suppose.)

Welcome back to relevance, MTV.

My Brain Just Broke…

Kyle Weems — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:02:13 +0000

I definitely need a tidbits section on the sidebar for stuff like this.

Square-Enix has released an RPG for the iPod called Song Summoner. You create warriors from various songs on your iPod, and fight foes in a Final Fantasy Tactics fashion with them. Ever want to see how the Bohemian Rhapsody stacks up in mortal combat against Thriller?

Oh. And it’s only $5.

I knew the iPod was also a software platform, but this is the first time I thought of it as something that a real game (as opposed to solitaire) could be played on.

Bad Handwriting

Kyle Weems — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:06:57 +0000

Everyone else has linked to it, so the following isn’t precisely a new scoop, but here is a really fascinating article by Cameron Adams about the handwriting of typographers. I found the article timely because I’ve been corralling up information about what I see as the enhancement of typography in web pages with the current and upcoming CSS @font-face support for some sort of blog entry thing, which should be bursting forth somewhere in the near future. (I make no promises about it being insightful, mind you.)

I wasn’t shocked to discover that a lot of the typographers featured have horrible handwriting. After all, house designers allegedly have bad livingrooms, and web designers frequently have blogs that aren’t quite put together yet. There’s something about being involved with something professionally that causes a person to give up on any application of the career in their personal life. Mind you, my own handwriting is chicken scratch, so I’m not much of one to talk.

However, after some tragic scuffles with legibility the article comes to Nikola Djurek‘s sample, which looks like something that was used to draft the Constitution. Handwriting of that quality makes me feel like my own attempt at imparting words to paper is a stillborn abomination that was tossed into a dumpster somewhere around the third grade.

Actually, I’m pretty sure my handwriting was better in the third grade than it is now. I’d hit the high point of mastering cursive, and had yet to begin the downward slide in legibility that would coincide with my obsession with keyboards and the flickering glow of monitors.

I need to add an “elsewhere in the web” sidebar or section to this site, I think, for stuff like this. Hardly a novel concept, I’m sure. I’m sure there’s a WordPress plugin (or twelve) for that, considering the many blogs I’ve seen equipped with such. Does anyone have any suggestions? I guess I could stop being lazy and look for myself, actually.