I’ve been listen­ing to Simon Jobling’s One Phat DJ, the excel­lent funky, sexy, house music pod­cast series. You should too. Twice a month, he out­puts more than an hour of wicked house tunes. Give the April 2008 Crescendo one a try for instance. Of course, this is com­ing from someone who’s “musical com­pat­ib­il­ity rat­ing” on last.fm is “Super” with One Phat DJ :)

So back to the sub­ject of this post: wall­pa­per. I reg­u­larly fea­ture wall­pa­per of house music I like, or rather wall­pa­pers based on the art­work of house music that I like. Now appar­ently, I have the need to cre­ate a wall­pa­per out of everything I open in pho­toshop. I was sup­posed to be cre­at­ing a cover for an upcom­ing pod­cast of One Phat DJ, when I real­ised I wasn’t busy cre­at­ing a cover at all — it was a wall­pa­per! So while that means I had to go back to the draw­ing board, I still thought it’d be nice to share it with all of you.

The “One Phat DJ — Pro” wall­pa­per is based on a Sam Hardacre sketch of the One Phat DJ char­ac­ter as fea­tured on the April ’08 Warm Up cover. While it’s obvi­ously inspired by the NBA logo, this style seems to be used for a lot of pro sports now, even pro gaming!

It’s avail­able for down­load in both wide-screen and square format. Feel free to use this wall­pa­per at home or at work, but please don’t redis­trib­ute (just link here).

Enjoy!

When Hed Kandi cre­ator Mark Doyle sold the label was forced to let go of the label [thanks for the cla­ri­fic­a­tion Mark] to Ministry of Sound, he left to start is own label with illus­trator Jason Brooks. Although the res­ult­ing label, Tokyo Project, is gone and a new one, Fierce Angels, has taken its place, there’s still art­work left from Tokyo Project!

Quite beau­ti­ful art­work too I might add. This par­tic­u­lar image was extrac­ted from the 2005 launch-parties’ flyer design, which was pos­ted on the web­site back then. All I’ve done is crop it and extend it a bit, so all credit should still go to the afore­men­tioned Jason Brooks. So without fur­ther ado:

This is the full 1280×1024 adapt­a­tion, with a nice roun­ded white bor­der run­ning at the top and left.

And for smal­ler screens (like my own) I’ve cre­ated a 10×7 ver­sion, which is slightly cropped com­pared to the ori­ginal. Enjoy them both!

Over the past year there’s been a lot of atten­tion (in cer­tain circles) for “micro­formats”. Essentially, micro­formats are stand­ard­isa­tions of class-values to use in html. The implied bene­fit is that any 3rd party (be it a browser or another site) could eas­ily gain access to that inform­a­tion and be able to do some­thing use­ful with it.

However, aside from a few prac­tical issues, micro­formats are a fun­da­ment­ally flawed idea.

Microformats are an attempt at cli­ent side innov­a­tion. Looking at the his­tory of (x)html, javas­cript and css (the three main cli­ent side tech­no­lo­gies), you can see it’s rife with incom­pat­ib­il­it­ies. The stand­ard­ised ver­sions of said tech­no­lo­gies have also had (and con­tinue to have) very long mar­ket pen­et­ra­tion times (the time it takes for the sup­port of a tech­no­logy to spread among end users).

The funny thing is that these prob­lems can be mit­ig­ated by some­thing very simple; server side innov­a­tion! It’d have a couple of huge advant­ages. First-off, it’d give more con­trol over the user exper­i­ence. Since micro­formats don’t define how they should be handled by User Agents (UA’s, like browsers or mail cli­ents), you have no way of know­ing how your code will exactly be inter­preted by them.

Secondly, it allows you to use more com­pat­ible tech­no­logy on the cli­ent side (html, css, vCards, pdf, you name it). This means it would work, right now, for every­one. Also, espe­cially for sites that use a CMS (sys­tem to man­age a sites’ con­tent), server side solu­tions are a lot easier to implement.

A few examples of micro­formats, and an explan­a­tion why they don’t provide any (busi­ness) benefits:

hCard — Have extra mark-up so you can point to an external site which pro­duces a vCard? Mark-up which might force you to deal with UA’s which may mess up the res­ult­ing vCard because they inter­pret hCards dif­fer­ently? Why not just upload a vCard or have your CMS gen­er­ate a vCard automatically?

hAtom — Making the page itself it’s own feed? So the full, heavy, page can be pinged by feed read­ers all the time, using far more band­width and mess­ing up stats? Are you kid­ding me?

So yes, I do think that micro­formats are not worth imple­ment­ing yourself.

Fierce Angels is awe­some. Inspiring. Makes you dance. Makes you groove.

Their music is reg­u­larly high­lighted by Simon Jobling in his One Phat DJ pod­cast, so I thought it might be nice to high­light the art­work asso­ci­ated with Fierce Angels (and Tokyo Project & Hed Kandi before). The artist in ques­tion is none other than the ever excel­lent — and mas­ter of vec­tor illus­tra­tion — Jason Brooks.

For your enjoy­ment, a wall­pa­per on the cover art of the ‘Digital Angel’ CD release by Fierce Angels.

Artwork was alas from a heav­ily arti­fac­ted jpeg (clear­ing up was one hell of a job I’ll tell ya) but Jason Brooks’ mas­ter­ful­ness should still shine through.

Different sizes are avail­able: 14×9 Widescreen, 10×7 Smallscreen, 12×10 Bigscreen, .

Bite Size Standards, a pro­ject that has taken up quite a lot of my time has launched today. It was ini­ti­ated by John Oxton of Joshuaink fame, but as CSS guy all parties had to deal with me, so I ended up doing and influ­en­cing a lot. It’s been really fun to work with the whole team and it’s been par­tic­u­larly great to finally shush out some semantic and access­ib­il­ity quer­ies. So for now, I’ll just leave you with a descrip­tion of what Bite Size Standards is.

Bite Size Standards aims to offer con­cise web devel­op­ment tutori­als, tips and tricks. Written by design­ers and developers who are pas­sion­ate about web standards.

A full slightly longer write-up of what we actu­ally went through and why we did cer­tain things will come a lot later and can be found on my port­fo­lio.

Not that I know what the proper name for this is, but I do know that subtly align­ing to a grid is very, very powerful.

( ~ Work from the Duarte Design Agency for their cli­ent Prophetik.)

Sooo…guess who’s occupy­ing the top-spot, the prime loc­a­tion, the num­bero uno place at Yahoo! for the search ‘Webdesign Portfolio’ ?

But what does one write on such an occa­sion? Is “I’d like to thank my fam­ily, my friends, the guys at gameover.com, my cli­ents, Programmers Notepad, all the nice people at Adobe — oh and Johnny, couldn’t have done it without you! *cue tears* ” really over the top? A tad too much eh?

Well, how about “Thank you for this token of your recog­ni­tion of my hard work and pure SEO, but I refuse to believe that my Journal is a bet­ter web­design port­fo­lio than my Portfolio. It’s not right I tell you, It’s not right!”. Is that bet­ter? Make me seem like an ungrate­ful so-and-so? Hmm, you’re prob­ably right..

So what does one say on such a joy­ous occa­sion?