Thoughts on design & technology

This is the space I use to talk about my interests, ideas, and projects. Most of the time, this will be focused on front-end web design and development.

I am, however, a creative with many interests. I may occasionally write about traditional art, illustration, printmaking, book making, productivity, organization, accessibility, ethics, and inclusion in design.

Latest Posts

1. Displaying Git info on the command prompt

   01 December 2023 · #tutorial #command line

   Let's look at how to display Git information as a part of the ZSH prompt.

2. Customizing ZSH

   05 November 2023 · #tutorial #command line

   Creating a custom terminal experience is something of a rite of passage for software developers, especially those who use the terminal every day. In this post, I take a tour through my current setup.

3. Code Comments Revisited

   01 May 2022 · #process

   Back in 2019 I made a post about a code comment plugin I had found for VS Code, and how I configured it to fit my needs. Today I wanted to expand on that to show how I go about commenting my code in general.

4. Resizing a MacOS window with the Shortcuts app

   05 April 2022 · #tutorial #process

   If you ever record or share your screen you may have wanted to get the window you were sharing to be a specific size or aspect ratio. Let's look at how to achieve this with Shortcuts.

5. Working with 11ty Collections

   06 March 2022 · #11ty #tutorial

   Create complex and nested collections to handle multiple taxonomies in a site built with 11ty

6. Making a leather discbound notebook cover

   20 August 2021 · #tutorial #bookmaking

   My custom discbound notebook has been a project of mine for a few years. I’ve tried all kinds of covers, both homemade and store-purchased, but none of them ever felt special or personal. Making a leather cover had been in the back of my mind for quite a while, so let's make one.

7. Website Redesign 2021

   05 July 2021 · #personal

   My website has always been a testing ground of new ideas, a place for me to experiment and learn new things, so it’s only natural I do a major redesign every other year or so. However this design marks a shift in how I talk about myself and my work.

8. Custom Discbound Notebook

   12 March 2021 · #bookmaking

   Today I share one of my personal labors of love, a project I’ve worked on for a few years, and one that continues to evolve - my notebook.

9. Writing Smarter CSS

   14 January 2021 · #css

   Authoring more robust CSS with smart selectors

10. Getting Started with Plausible

    02 December 2020 · #analytics #tutorial

    Plausible is a fantastic alternative to existing JS based analytics solutions. Inexpensive, lightning fast, and build around privacy.

11. Approaches to Web Typography

    20 August 2020 · #typography #design #css

    There are a handful of ways we can use what we learned about modular scales when creating the typographical system of our website, from simple single scale systems to fully fluid typography. This article will take a look at each style and implementation, but all of these systems aim to address the question of how to handle text on both small and large screens.

12. Vertical Rhythm

    13 July 2020 · #typography #design #css

    Vertical rhythm is a concept in typography that aims to keep vertical spaces between elements consistent with each other. This creates repeatable patterns that readers subconsciously understand and use to read faster and more accurately.

13. Typographical Scales

    30 June 2020 · #typography #design #css

    In any form of design, one uses a series of measures to plan and layout the product. Measurements create precision, consistency, and promote trustworthiness. In print, common measurements are inches, centimeters, points, and picas. In the world of digital and web design we use pixels and more relative measurements such as percentages.

14. On a Modern Grid

    23 January 2020 · #css

    Back in October, Marvin Danig made a fantastic blog post on the state of responsive web design and the future of CSS frameworks. I wanted to continue some of his points and see how a responsive first grid system might look.

15. CSS Organization

    06 December 2019 · #css #process

    While researching best practices of CSS organization this past year for a huge UI project at work, I ran across several ideas and strategies to solve this problem. My goal here is to digest these ideas and formulate a more comprehensive approach to organizing CSS.

16. Code Comment Anchors

    02 November 2019 · #process

    One of the really cool plugins I found for VS Code is this tool called Comment Anchors. It’s a way of adding more visible, meaningful comments to your code. I’m a really big fan of writing documentation in the code itself, so its nice to have a way to highlight the most important notes.