Making progress…

I'm currently on my fourth and (hopefully) last year at Arcada Uni. According to my plans i'll be graduating in the spring of 2012! Yay!

But it's a looong way there, the biggest work this year will be my final production and thesis. Yesterday i came up with a great and ambitious topic for both of those. Creating a own typeface! I'll be writing my thesis about typefaces used on multiple platforms (print, screen, phone and tv) and the problematics around that. I'll also be creating my very own typeface and the idea is that it would function well on all these platforms.

This will mean that i won't be abel to write (irregularly) here as much. But stay tuned, as i'll be posting progress of my work here.

This is a nice site i found, aworkinglibrary.com

Create a folder containing your current selection by choosing File > New Folder with Selection or by pressing Control-Command-N.

via onethingwell

“You ever think about how in, like, a Tom Hanks movie, everyone lives in
  a reality in which there’s no such person as Tom Hanks?”

The quote above can be found on The Mavenist, a new blog or what ever you want to call it. Go and have a look, there's a lot of intresting things written there.

Found this great jQuery snippet over at stackoverflow on how to calculate the total width of all children!

var width = 0;
$('.fileGroup .file').each(function() {
width += $(this).outerWidth( true );
});
$('.fileGroup').css('width', width + 0);

The thing is that i don't like to install extensions on my browser (Chrome), i think that they make it slooow and sluggish. Nevertheless they are a necessary evil and occasionally i install some. Today i discovered a truly great extension called WhatFont and it's really great! Ever wondered what fonts some site is using but don't like to fiddle with the web inspector? Then this is for you.

I'm currently making a one-page portfolio and I wanted a nice jQuery scroll to anchor function. After some searching and testing, I stumbled on this and it works great! A lot less code than the other ones I found.

$('a[href*=#]').bind('click', function(e) {
e.preventDefault(); //prevent the "normal" behaviour which would be a "hard" jump

var target = $(this).attr("href"); //Get the target

// perform animated scrolling by getting top-position of target-element and set it as scroll target
$('html, body').stop().animate({ scrollTop: $(target).offset().top }, 400, function() {
location.hash = target; //attach the hash (#jumptarget) to the pageurl
});

return false;
});

Found it here

Ok, so today i've spent several hours on drawing letters and words. Calligraphy is so much fun, and it's nice that you get away from the computer and just sit and focus on drawing it more perfect each time. I kinda like the fact that there is no undo option, you have to nail it on first try.

Anyway, i made a A3 sized calligraphy using basic watercolors and a marker for tracing it back. I'm betting on that it would have been easier with real tools but hey, turned out ok.

I was going to name this post something wierd at first, like ‘Stuff i found on Frank Chimero's blog’. On second thought, it sounded awkward so i changed it. The stuff i found is pretty good.

First off we have a article called Your Shit, My Stuff, Goldilocks, and Making the Bed You Sleep In. This was quite a bit to read but well worth the time.

Secondly, i found out that he has a nice collection of mixtapes available online. I've spent the past two days listening to them, you should try them too!

A month or so ago, I bought a one-year subscription of Crash Plan, a pretty sweet online bakup service. The one thing that was bugging me was that the initial backup took about an week or so to finnish so I had my mac pretty much running 24/7. After the first night I realized that I needed some app or some way to prevent it from falling a sleep so the it could do the backups.

I've been a happy user of caffeine ever since and it does a fine job. Today while reading One Thing Well I found something superior, a terminal command named pmset. Basically it's a command line tool to tinker with the energy saving settings.

Type pmset noidle and your computer won't fall a sleep until you hit ctrl+c, pretty neat!

After thinking about it for a while, I decided to ditch the horizontal scrolling. I felt it didn't bring any real benefits to the site, if anything it brought restrictions. My original idea was to get the images feel more vibrant and have a contrast in size, with the horizontal scrolling I had to keep all the images the same size in order to maintain a good looking site that was usable on a smaller screen. I feel that going back to a vertical scrolling site was a better solution.

What do you think? Send me a tweet @matudesign or an email if you have opinnions about it.

PS. Yes, I am aware that in my previous post I said that the theme would remain untouched for the next six months or so. I have thus failed at my self-brought chalenge—or have I—does this even count?

You have probably noticed the lack of updates, this is due the fact that I've been working on a redesign for this very site. I have lost count on the version number, but I think I'll stick with this for a longer time, say a half-year (or even a whole year!) minimum. Let's see how that goes.

I noticed that curating my blog over at blog.mathiaslindholm.com wasn't going very well so I decided to move it here and write a less frequently updated but a more interesting journal. My goal is to produce one to five posts per month that are interesting enough to read and not your typical found this on the interwebs -post.

The URL wasn't the only thing that got switched, I also went from using Wordpress as my blogging platform to Secretarycms' built-in blog module. I felt that this switch was a good move for several reasons:

• I now get access to everything in one login vs. perviously i had a separate login for the blog and another for the portfolio
• The built in module is way more simple than wordpress, i have 5 fields and empty textfield to be conserned about, and no WYSIWYG editor either, just plain text with code
• Due to the simplicity I can now focus on the one main thing—writing

So, hope you enjoy!

PS. Alltough the secretary blogging system isn't flawless—writing HTML tags in the textfield is kinda annoying. Wish it would support markdown or textile, then I would be really happy.

My new Secretary powered website is up!