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novemberalphasierraechonovemberalphasierraecho asked:
Your site designs look pretty cool. Have you considered releasing/selling them?

Every time I build a new template I think to myself, I should clean this up and release it. And then I get to the part where I need to support all the various niche Tumblr features, add things like detailed likes and reblog info, create customizable colors, etc, etc. So I give up. I’m also not a huge fan of other sites looking exactly like mine while I’m using the theme.

This most recent design is very simple, code-wise, and would probably make an easy transition, so perhaps when I move away from it I’ll package it up and release it. I appreciate the interest, though.

Maniacal Rage, Version 22

Hi! I redesigned. Remember when people used to redesign their blogs every few months? Back before the plethora of amazing premium Tumblr themes with one-click installs and the urge to make your site just a single white page with black text and some huge photos? I remember. I used to redesign this site every few months—22 times in past 8 years—and that doesn’t count the 10 or so designs I did between 1999 and 2005 before I started keeping archived screenshots. It got out of hand. I don’t know how I managed that without insanity or injury. Then again I have severe medial epicondylitis and I feel crazy most days, so maybe I didn’t manage well after all.

But here we are again! I had a few goals with this design:

  1. Reduce the size of photos so they’re still big and nice but they don’t cannibalize the rest of the content. The past two designs made the photos bigger and bigger and a paragraph of text next to one looked ridiculous. Besides, if you really want to see my photos huge, you can always click over to Flickr.
  2. Get away from Helvetica. I spend all day developing and designing iOS apps which means I see Helvetica 23.5 hours a day. I dream in Helvetica. I wanted a little break. Granted, I chose two fonts that are heavily overused (Proxima Nova and FF Tisa Web Pro), but I really enjoy them so that’s where we’re at.
  3. Never open Photoshop, only use a single image for that smiling photo of me up top. And make that image mask scalable (thanks, SVG). Any other imagery is done with web fonts.
  4. Start and finish the project in 48 hours or less. It ended up being 51 hours from start to finish, but I’m okay with that.

Every few months I tend to find something about my design blocking me from posting (the most recent two designs it was the photo issue), but that’s probably just a lazy excuse. Over the past few days, I’ve become excited about blogging again (as well as another infamous project I’m resurrecting soon). Time to get back on the horse.

I keep my OS X dock on the left side of the screen so this won’t really mean much to me long-term, but the new dock design in Mountain Lion is much nicer. I played around with it for a bit on my MacBook Air, and one nice change is even though it still reflects things on the screen like a jackass, the effect is far subtler.

Apple redesigned the Airport Utility app for OS X. It now looks much like the recently released iOS app and gives you a prettier, more useful look at your network. They’ve streamlined the settings themselves too… this is a huge win UI/UX-wise.

Update: Dan Wineman pointed out that version 6.0, while pretty, removes several useful features (including IPv6 configuration and wireless client monitoring). Turns out you can now install both this version of Airport Utility and the older version, 5.6, which has been updated. You must install 6.0 first and update your Base Stations, then you can grab the 5.6 build and install it as well. Looks like Apple is going for a consumer version for its mainstream release (the version pictured here) but keeping the older, more “pro” version updated as well.

Speaking of what’s in my dock, why are all application developers still using blue as their primary icon color? I know I’m not the first person to complain about this, but it’s really out of control.

Because it’s so wide-spread, applications with more colorful icons (in this case, Reeder, Chrome and iA Writer) stand much more and look less generic. Icon designers: It’s time to quit blue for a while. It’s okay. There are other colors out there.

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jkspnjkspn asked:
Will you ever be releasing themes to the Theme Garden? Your old one and this one both look nice!

I struggle with this. I’d love to release some of my old themes, but the amount of time they’d require to clean up, make generic, and add features to is a little overwhelming. I am hoping to make my previous theme available at some point, probably as a very cheap premium theme.