2015, in short

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Inspired, as I so often find myself, by Mel Kramer — this time her “What did you make this year” post, to which I am a tiny but proud contributor.

What did I do this year? 

I wrote some things I’m proud of. [1] [2] [3] [4]

I moved in with my girlfriend, we started a blog, we started building a life. I learned a great deal about being a father.

I traveled, for work and for pleasure. I saw both coasts, and traced the path so many times from Dallas to Tulsa to see friends and family.

I pushed myself professionally, and learned to do things I couldn’t do before.

I told a story about my favorite hill.

I sold my pickup truck.

I did lots of other things, too, but these things made the cut. Mostly I’m just thinking about what I’ll do in 2016. Here’s hoping it’s a good one for all of us.

Afterlife

Emily Kai Bock’s jarringly gorgeous new video for Arcade Fire’s latest single Afterlife.

Austin, Texas

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Kept thinking of ways to make this big announcement, but I’ll just come right out with it: I’m moving to Austin, Texas at the end of April. I think those of you who know me won’t be surprised. I’ve needed a change for a long time now.

I love you Tulsa, and I’ll miss you. But more on that in a later post.

New Theme

A long time coming, but finally here: the ump-teenth redesign of this blog, featuring a few firsts for me. Notable points include:

  • html5 & css3
  • responsive, mobile first design
  • Elegant balance of typography with imagery
  • No images for the design (lightweight)
  • No small photos on the site (thumbnail-free)
  • Custom post types (standard, aside, image; video coming soon)
  • Bite-sized content on the home page (custom post excerpts and large images)

Essentially I designed this theme from the ground up with my own work in mind. I produce media in a variety of formats, and often the strict bloggy nature of my previous themes kept me from displaying my work in a way that did it justice. In short, I’m utilizing post types to achieve this: “aside” posts feature primarily text, rendered large and legible; “standard” posts balance text and images and are suited to longer format posts; “image” posts display my photographs and graphics the way I want them: large, “full-bleed”, and perhaps most importantly without thumbnails or lightboxes.

I’ve read a lot of angry / heated language about the use of larger fonts as body text on the web recently, but I don’t buy it. I’ve designed the text on this site to be both legible and elegant; I have balanced longer line widths with wider line spacing and used media queries to adjust text for various screen sizes. Modern displays provide an ever-decreasing pixel size and an ever-growing resolution, which results in more screen real estate; for Thoughts on Stuff  I’ve chosen to dedicate that real estate to big images and legible type that’s allowed to breathe.

Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and yours. I hope you get everything you asked for and eat so much pie you can’t see straight.

michael

IgniteOKC

Tonight I’ll be making the trip down the turnpike to give a talk at IgniteOKC. If you’re not familiar with the concept of Ignite, here’s a little info from the website:

Started by Brady Forrest, Technology Evangelist for O’Reilly Media, and Bre Pettis of Etsy.com, formerly of MAKE Magazine, Ignite […] speakers are given 20 slides, each shown for 15 seconds, giving each speaker 5 minutes of fame.

I’m giving a talk entitled “The Power of Visual Communication: Together, We Can Rid the World of Comic Sans” tonight at the Lyric Theater in OKC. I’ll be talking about how sloppy and thoughtless our communication has become in modern society, and giving some tips about what everyone can do to improve the quality of their own visual communication. Here’s a teaser:

The event sold out only hours after tickets were released, but there will be a live stream of the event and all talks will be posted to youtube later on. You can bet that, barring any really bad screw-ups, I’ll be posting said video here on the blog just as soon as it’s available.

New Stuff All Around

I’ve moved the site onto a new WordPress installation so things might look a little odd while I iron out the details. I’m running WordPress 3.0, which means exciting new features and more stuff to learn. What you see here is my very first (and very much work-in-progress) theme for WP3. As it stands, it supports:

  • Custom header images
  • Custom background colors
  • Article Images
  • Custom Menus

with plans to add

  • Custom post types (in my case a custom portfolio display)
  • Custom post taxonomies (not so much because I need them as I want to learn how they work)

so yeah. That’s all good and quite geeky; just thought I’d get the technical stuff out of the way.