Posts filed under "broken-kode"
Cerebral Interviews - The official Broken Kode newsletter, powered by TinyLetter. Been meaning to do something like this for a while. The goal is to craft 12 useful and entertaining emails in the year 2012. No more no less. Published at the end of every month.
I know, it’s been a while and by this stage I’m probably talking to myself, which is fair enough to be honest. There have been several things that have prevented me from actually writing and posting, which is really down to both environment and workflow. I was originally going to write a separate post for each topic, but I found that the two topics were closely interrelated.
Environment
The environment to help me publish hasn’t been ideal. The first reason was due to the fact that I don’t have any internet access in my home. It’s been like that for over a month now, and it’s really starting to become disruptive to me. I could post from work, however the firewalls are restrictive and that makes it a colossal pain in the ass.
Apart from the technical aspects of my current situation, silence is reflective of the mood I’m currently in about the internet. Once upon a time I used to love the internet. I used to live it on a daily basis. I was actively involved in trying to bring something different to it on a regular basis. Over the last few months and even years now that has changed. I think the problem is that the internet has changed considerably - and I have not found my place in it.
The barriers are smaller and the noise is much, much larger. Over time I could see less and less people commenting on my website, and my silly Facebook posts would garner more attention and responses. And so you loose a certain amount of interest in keeping things fresh, keeping things moving on the site.
The great thing about this site is that it has a history and it has a distinct style about it. I’ve written some good stuff and some shitty stuff as well. I’ve learnt a great deal, interacted with some great people.
Is it time to retire the site? I don’t think so - after years, I’ve finally got it into a state that I like it (I’ve had this site design for nearly 2 years now). As I write this I wonder if I could take it to part of it’s previous glory. Of course the main issue here is that it’s a completely different place and time, so things will be more difficult and that took a hell of a lot of commitment.
The reason I am still confident in the future of words on this website, is because of my new found love for simple text. I have this appreciation now of words that I have written. I think part of this new found love is down to a few tools, Notational Velocity, my iPhone, Simplenote and the brilliance of Markdown. The seamless integration between these tools, and the fact that all of my thoughts and notes about anything and everything are always with me, (obviously organised in a meticulous fashion) helps me to feel more empowered.
Which happily brings me to my next point. Once my technical barriers that have an affect on my environment, the next barrier which needs to be removed are those to my workflow. I’ve outgrown the current CMS. The current crop of content management systems don’t really provide the level of respect to text files that I would want.
Workflow
So what is the system that I would like to adopt right now? Well after trolling through the internet, I’ve not found something that actually fits my requirements (well nothing that is fully baked).
One solution which I thought had some potential (so much so that I actually coded the next iteration of my site using that system already), was Stacey. This had a couple of problems, mainly the lack of an iOS text editor that could be readily integrated into the workflow (there’s that word again) and secondly there is no archiving system, even though this could be a prime solution if something like this was added, although I have no idea how active the project currently is.
Marco does seem to be working on something that might be exceedingly interesting. He’s not published the source code, because he’s tinkering around with it, which is REALLY annoying. Get on with it and just ship the damn thing Marco. Geeks will huddle around it instantly.
Trolling on Github, I found a bunch of options available that actually do this (clearly I’m not the only one that feels this way). The most promising of the lot was MopBlown, which I’m actually talking with Chris about at the moment, to try and help him move things along, we’ll see how that moves along.
The existing paradigm where you login into an admin panel, wait for shit to load, then click on pages, wait for more shit to load, then you type in things, the wait for shit to get published or built or whatever is not for a small website. There is a better solution for this. Here’s a list of the things that I would like to see in the next generation of website management system with a direct focus on text and markdown.
- The system should be able to parse simple text files that are written in Markdown. I should be able to write something in my text editor, and either directly FTP the file (using something like Textwrangler or BBEdit). Editing would be as simple as opening the file locally and then editing away and saving again. An alternative method is to be able to put it in a Dropbox folder which is synched to a specific account set up for this sort of thing. The real issue here is that it should be able to do either of these things on any iOS enabled text editor with Dropbox synchronisation.
- I should also be able to send an email, also written in Markdown and it will parse this accordingly. Save it onto the server, as per the rest of the files as well should also ‘publish’ a file as well.
- The other part of this puzzle is how you get a bunch of other items into this system. If I see an image I like on a website, I read a quote I thought was good, I want to send a link, maybe on the very very odd occasion I want to have a video (very rare for me to do that), then I should have a way to do this. I should have a backend of some description that would allow me to actually send this information. The backend should then store the post as a text file and an image, saved in a media folder.
- The final part of this system is that it should resolve archiving in a simple way. Depending on the date that the original date from file in Dropbox and then should be able to show an archive of the files depending on when it was originally ‘published’.
As you can tell, I’m in this weird transitional state at the moment. There are so many excellent and mature methods of publishing on the web, but none of them are for me at the moment, they don’t fit into my workflow.
The thing that I naturally permeate towards instinctively are are the things that I basically want, admire or are curious about. These are the things that I basically would like to have. These are the things that put a smile on my face, and which ultimately I like to talk about.
Cognisant: adjective [ predic. ] having knowledge or being aware of
This thinking actually can be attributed in many ways to Objectified which honestly completely changed the way I look and appreciate products and design. I guess that was the point of it all, but it seriously touched me in a profound way that no other documentary has ever done. A year and a half after I watched it I still think about things it said or tried to say. Sure there were several douche bags on there, but the message was there.
Crucially, in an in advert way it’s basically opened my eyes as to what this particular site will be about and has been building towards all these years.
While I’ve always wanted a space for my projects to live, and my art, it’s only a small part of me and there may be months before I am able to show what I’m working on a regular basis, even though I honestly am creating things on a relatively regular basis. It’s not just about what I create, it’s not just my therapy. It needed focus.
Which brings us to the here and now. Over the last couple of years I’ve been honing and observing things as I develop a sense of what I like and what I don’t like. Sometimes I used this site to achieve this. Recently I’ve been thinking that ultimately the site needed a direction, something it’s not had since it began. The focus seemed to be on design in general, then it meandered off to blogging software, which was like this loop of eating it’s own tail.
The thing that I hope to concentrate on in the future is the idea Cognisant Design.
It took a bloody long time to finally come up with this collection of words. I kept floating between ‘Considered’ and ‘Cognisant’. They are close to each other in meaning, but it’s more than thinking about something. It’s about knowing the reasons for those decisions. I’m sure I’m not the first to come up with these words together, but I hope to bring to the fore what this actually means and highlight examples of this design sense in action.
It’s not a question of minimal design. It’s not a question of functional design, it’s a question of design that is thought out completely, where things we done in a very calculated fashion, even if those calculations lead to what might be hyper detail or bright bursts of colour.
Although I’ve tried to describe it in this post, I feel that the best way to show what it is that I am talking about is to actually show rather than tell. I don’t think I can post this sort of thing on a regular basis, so the linkblogging will continue, however in addition to these quick things I will be focusing on Cognisant Design and hopefully we’ll all learn something new together.
I’ve been writing for nearly a week now on a regular basis. Most of the time it’s just words falling out of my brain and onto the page. On the side however I’ve been working on a pretty long post, that I knew had a point to it, but honestly I didn’t know where it was actually going.
The ultimate goal of this post was to define the need for this site in a world that doesn’t read ‘blogs’ anymore. The idea was that I change with the times and this site becomes more than me talking about my bonsai tree (which I love, but nearly killed) or my favourite iPhone application, rather it will be talking about these issues, however done in a completely different way, with a very different focus - it will become clear once I’ve actually posted that article, I assure you.
The thing that’s really struck me however is the fact that I wouldn’t have reached my goal and ultimately my focus had I not actually written all these other words and effectively made some space for the idea to come to the surface. The outcome of this particular post will be a complete shift in they way content is written and presented on this site, as I shift it and it becomes something different. In a changing world it’s important that one understands when you have to move on, adapt or start over.
In this case the ‘kode will remain giving some personal thoughts, and providing links, but ultimately it will be much more focused. How long will it take before I can deliver this vision, I’m not sure. I get married in a little over a month and as you can imagine we’re racing to the finish line trying to sort out all sorts of things, so I’m assuming that it won’t happen until after the wedding, but alas if I do get some time to complete these things I’m definitely going take that opportunity.
So I’ve been on an iPhone for a little over 7 months, and I’ve kinda stumbled my way through most things on my first iDevice. As of late, I’ve decided to sort myself out and by extension sort my iPhone out as well.
Email and Calendar Sync
The first thing that I sorted out was converting my email/calendar to a push notified Gmail account. The way you do that is not by using the Gmail option to creating an account, but rather using the Microsoft Exchange option on the iPhone which basically does that automatically. That I’ve found to be completely awesome as opposed to the Fetch protocol that I was using before, with my Mail app being updated every hour or something.
The next thing that I needed to sort out is my calendar options. I will use my Google Calendar on occasion, but will rarely use iCal really. In fact I probably use my office Outlook more than I’ve ever used my iCal application, it’s just not something I’m used to doing at home. Calendars are definitely something I do throughout the day, rather than the evening.
Photos Mess
The last part of the puzzle that needs to be sorted out is my photos. What a complete and utter mess these things are in at the moment. The thing is they’re also taking a whole slew of space on my iPhone as well. Ever since I migrated over to my new macbook install I basically put aperture…big mistake. Thought I was doing something clever. As it turns out I screwed myself as Aperture doesn’t allow for the files to be deleted from the iPhone when you’re synching. There are other options, but honestly I’m not all that enamoured by Aperture and it’s just as slow as iPhoto (so I’ve not gained much in way of performance).
I need to get a few older files from my previous back, get iPhoto up and running on my mac, migrate back to iPhoto completely and then clean up my photo folder.
iPhone Applications Purge
Once that’s done I just need to clean up my Files folder and also my Scanner Pro folder as it’s got a bunch of additional stuff that doesn’t need to be there, and I think my minimal setup is complete.
It’s also probably time to purge a few applications off the phone as well, as the number of applications creeps back up to 45, which obviously I don’t use all the time.
Also while I’m talking about iPhone applications, there are a couple of serious keepers for the forseeable future:
- Piggie: This is a direct change from MoneyBook
- Simple Note: Just can’t believe I did without this application for so long. It’s basically the gmail of notes. I’m finally bloody organised enough to have all of my notes with me all the time in a way that is clear and synced across my machines. Game changer.
- NightStand Central - The only alarm application that you will ever need. Or at least till something simpler comes along, but I have to say I love this application and the way it uses the hardware is excellent.
Damn, the whole news years thing came and went by and I didn’t get a chance to finish off my end of 2010 review. Still got a couple more posts on this.
Reading
On account of the audiobooks the actual reading of books has somewhat been lackluster. The last book I think I actually read was Amin Maalouf’s Origins. Prior to that I finished of Malcom Gladwell’s ‘What the Dog Saw’. Interspersed I tried getting into ‘Black Swan’ and the Osamu Tezuka art and biography book with different levels of success. Finally I finished of Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel - which I actually didn’t enjoy. As much as Life of Pi blew my mind, Beatrice and Virgil just left me cold. Pretty poor showing. It’s not that I don’t have a ton of books that I really want to read, it’s just that finding the descipline to actually do the reading is a bit difficult.
The countless articles I’ve read online and in the various magazines I’ve bought over the year don’t get counted. The tweets I’ve read and wasted more time on, don’t get counted. That said, I am a bit embarressed to confess that on more than one occasion I would by the Economist (which I honestly believe is one of the best magazines for getting information on what’s going on in the world) and not actually read much of it, past the cover story. I think what I’ll try and do is, once a month try and actually get through an issue of the economist. Every week is a tall order, but once a month should be ok.
I also bought a few issues of Wired. The typical price in Lebanon is 19,000LL, which is approximately $12.5, around 8.5 quid, which is nearly double the cover price. Which is probably why I’m going to try and limit myself to reading this magazine once every couple of months.
I didn’t get into any new magazines over this last year, which is strange. I keep wanting to buy a Computer Arts, or a Mac World or something like that, but always end up putting it back on the shelf, as it just feels like a lot more disposable than the price tag requires. The one nice thing that gets imported however is ‘The Guardian’ weekly. This is a digest of all the top stories in the Guardian provided in this A4 stapled format, which is easy to digest on a Saturday morning. It’s definitely something I’m considering buying more often in the future.
I guess I’m not being controversial here when I say I’d like to read a few more books. How I go about this is going to be interesting. Maybe I need to train myself to read at least 10 pages before I go to bed, multiplied over 30 days gives me 300 pages, which is roughly the size of an average novel. Sure some books are larger, but we’re generalizing here. Obviously best laid plans and all of that, but it could become a way of life.
It’s an interesting experiment, and will guarantee at least one book a month minimum.
Continuing with my year end review, I talked about blogging in general, now I get down to this site in particular and creativity and projects in general.
Website
Regarding this website, very little was done in 2010. I tweaked the design ever so slightly and updated the engine to the latest version of Habari, but apart from that I honestly haven’t done that much. That’s not true, I added some @media queries and did a bit of updating when it comes to trying to give the site some responsive design. Sadly it’s not really there yet, or at least it doesn’t render the way I imagine it to render on my iPhone, but that’s only because I’ve not done enough testing and reading around the subject.
I keep wanting to update with a lighter version, but I keep coming back to the darker colours and staying put. I know I will probably go for a slightly lighter motif pretty soon. Also I’d like to clean up the code finally as it’s a bit of a mess really. That’ll be the first thing I would like to do in January 2011. The design will pretty much remain the same, the underpinning will get lighter, the colours will change and I’ll probably add more doodles and images to places.
I guess I’m definitely of the mind to continue with the evolution of the site rather than a complete revolution. It works for me and it’s lasted the longest since I launched this site.
Creatively
Creatively this year has had some immense highs and some very long creative-less months. The main peak of creative activity as you can imagine all happened during my sabbatical months. Sadly that wasn’t meant to last as shortly within those months I had to start planning my change of life and country. Having said that I still managed to do a few things. First of which was this drawing for my cousin, using my lettering style which I developed a few months earlier for another little pet project.
Then there was this little drawing, which then got made into a glass painting which I get to look at every day.
I managed to make a few logos, some of which were actually used in the physical world, which again I thought was fantastic to see.
As if all of that wasn’t enough I got to complete my first draft and having been slowly hacking away at the second draft. It’s not as far along as I want it to be, but then again when was it ever going to be? Being this far along is reward enough. At least I’ve not given up on the dream. Given up on the dream, I’ve not worked this much on it ever. I’m waking up every morning and actually moving the process along.
Then finally, out of nowhere, I’ve even started off and created a little new robot character. I know I have a love for these things. It was completely by accident and it was inspired by me wanting to use my iPhone for something other than just consumption. I wanted to use it for creating. I am in the process of drawing a small backlog of pages so that I can start soliciting it on a weekly basis, which should be a nice distraction from all the other stuff that I’ve got going on at the moment.
When put like that, the output doesn’t seem too bad. There are a ton of projects I didn’t get to start, which I put the idea down on paper but never got around to. Ultimately however things actually were completed.
One of the things that I’m going to try and do next year is put rough deadlines. Even if I don’t meet these deadlines, at least I’ll push myself in the general direction of actually doing the work. Yes I might get a bit stressed while I do it, but that’s ok, it means I can look back on the year and be happy for what I completed. Actually completing projects is what keeps me happy. I’m also definitely going to buy this book.
That is pretty strange. I just was looking at the traffic logs on the site and I noticed a really really strange trend. At the start of the year I was seriously moving back up in terms of traffic. June was an epic month but I think that’s mainly attributed to the fact that I had a spreadsheet hosted here for the world cup and that generated a ton of traffic from Google.
But after that month there is this unbelievable drop of nearly 1/5 of the visitors. I mean even the months before this epic month were not as low as that. Did I change anything between the two months? Well for a start there was a less posting on the site? The ‘Kode is not like other sites where I basically post 3 or 4 times a day and have a super specific niche. The site is a personal blog that talks about all sorts of random pop culture items.
There is a ton of those on the web nowadays, but the question is finding which ones have got a unique voice, and that’s actually incredibly difficult to do. I neither have the time, nor do I feel like I am part of a community of people any more. Blog comments don’t exist any more, or no one really uses them as much as they used.
I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, and I don’t mind the smaller readership, it’s kind of fun to be honest, because I can go back to being as foul mouthed as I want without having to worry about anyone taking offence (or maybe less so than I would normally), it’s just what the hell happened in July to drive EVERYONE away :).
The plan is, and lets see if I can keep this up, is to give at least 2 posts a day. Sometimes they will be links, other times it will be longer based posts on things that i enjoy or am going through, lets see if I can keep this up.brok
So now that the plugins are working on the site, I’ve been able to get the archives plugin working, in the new Archives page. Still needs a lot of work to unify that look, but it’s nice to see all my posts over the years in one place. Definitely a slow down in the last year or so.
Broken Kode, there’s an app for that - not really, it doesn’t exist but if you like having websites as icons on your Iphone (you known by making a bookmark in mobile safari and then saving it to your homepage), the ‘Kode now has a customised icon just for that.
The way to do it is pretty simple, here’s a couple of links to help you with the “technical bits”, templates you might want to use and how to hide the address bar in mobile safari to show more of the site straight away:
The act of blogging on a daily basis, seriously seems like it was centuries ago, when only a few years ago I would have been doing this nearly every day a couple of times. The amount of words that I typed over the years now that I sit down and consider everything is a lot (others did a hell of a lot more, but then again others made it their business to do this). I’d talk and discuss just about everything that was on my mind, in detail. Reams of consciousness would come out on a daily basis for people to digest, and there were many people at the time digesting it all. Now it’s very quiet over here. Part of me actually likes this quiet, and another part remembers the good old days when blogs reigned supreme. I guess now it’s all about the 140 characters or the facebook updates or the plethora of other ways that people communicate online. Also I don’t spend enough time tweaking the site, but that’s only because I’m actually happy with the overall look. The pages are clear (it’s taken me this long to get to this stage) and I finally have a mini portfolio section that I can point people towards. It’s not innovative in any way. Hell it’s not even particular exciting, but it’s clean and it’s minimal and it does it’s job to convey the information well. I would argue that it needs three more sets of colours to signify the changing of the seasons (which I very well might actually do). The thing is that a site is only relevant if you actually continually update with current issues. From a promotional point of view I don’t do that any more. I hardly go online to other blogs, I don’t reply to many tweets. I don’t find things I’m interested in and go for it. The main reason? I guess it’s because I did that for years…not months, years. And now, I don’t really care about that stuff. I finally have what I want in terms of an online presence, one that I am happy with. I’ve tried over the years to give something back to people that gave me something and gave a great deal of my time and sleep to this. Now it’s about my day job and the free time that I have I want to concentrate on my comic book. I’m slowly starting to creep my way back into getting my second draft completed. Obviously life always seems to get in the way, which I’m going to have to learn to either balance or deal with, but that’s a post for another time.
My god, it’s been a good long while since I’ve posted here, and honestly there is sooo much good stuff to talk about. The main issue I guess is that now my thoughts are distributed across the net. From Flickr, to Facebook, from Twitter to Instagram, to Google Reader. It’s no longer concentrated in one spot.
Also, I don’t update with personnal stuff, which really is what this blog was originally meant to be about. It’s a long form of expression, something that none of the above are.
So here’s the first bit of news, I’m officially engaged. Yeah, pretty sudden, even for me, but I guess, when you know, you know. And I knew very very quickly with Yasmine, from the first date I knew there was something up. Hopefully I might get her to start blogging on here as well.
Now all I need is a Habari app for my iphone and I’m good - yeah I got myself a brand spanking new iphone, which I love of course.
OhLife - If you start seeing more blogging action here on the ‘Kode in the coming months, it’ll be thanks to this site. Over the years I’ve used different methods to actually communicate online. First it was a newsletter to my friends as a long bastard email. Then it was this blog. Then it was Facebook for a while and a bit of twitter. Now, now it’s nothing really. But I love writing, and I love maintaining this site. Writing an email to myself every day, with my most banal things is a good way of getting back to blogging again. At least that’s the thought process.
One thing I love about the OhLife site is just how beautifully put together it actually is. It’s a single column design (just the way I like it) with subtle backgrounds and little details everywhere. The colour scheme is calm and the little bit of red brings out everything as well.
The guys have been smart enough to make sure to allow you to export your entries as well incase you wanna do something with them, and setting up an account is exactly as it should be, completely painless.
You probably haven’t noticed but now the ‘Kode comes with a completely responsive shiney design, and by responsive design I mean it responds to the size of your screen, well by responds to the size of your screen, I mean if it’s less than 480px (size of your iphone/ipod/blackberry?) then you’ll still be able to read very clearly (without scrolling horizontally) my AMAZING writing, and the brilliant commentary that I provide to you on an extremely sporadic nature - what can I say I’m feeling in a sarcastic mood today.
So if you’re reading it on your feed reader, I guess you could visit the site properly to have a look. The main area i’m pretty happy with is the fact that even the images resize to accommodate (like in the illustration section).
The truth of the matter is, the current version of the ‘Kode is soo simple that doing this was pretty painless, and took an a few hours to read up on how to actually do it. The best resource as you would expect is found at these two A List Apart articles:
Then of course there are the prime examples to look at how this is achieved. Jonathan Hick’s for example has gone ALL out, with stylesheets for the iphone, ipad, 600px resolution, smaller, bigger whatever, it’s crazy - who the hell’s got the time? The general plan for the site is to keep doing general maintenance on the site and adding little things like this and generally bringing the design tighter together, trying to stay abreast with what’s going on the web (rather than being ahead of the curve).
Obviously, I could give a shit if it works in Internet Explorer.
So I’m there minding my own business, just checking my feeds and I see a familiar sight. Manji was mentioned on Devlounge as one of the single column themes of choice.
That’s pretty cool actually, seeing as it was designed over 4 years ago and hasn’t really been modified since. What’s interesting to me really is that there does seem a severe lack of super simple themes out there. Super simple is fucking hard to do and make stick - but that’s a topic for another time, which I fully intend on exploring.
Oh and btw, this is officially Broken Kode’s 1500th post.
Inspired by Coudal, I’ve decided to have a Page 2. It’s basically everything that doesn’t fit into my minimalist design. I’ll have to go into this design a bit more to be honest, because it’s basically longest running design. Every time I try and make it ‘better’ I always end up coming back to the same thing, only with a minor tweak here or there. I’ve not really talked about it, because it never seems all that interesting. What is interesting is that I’ve got over 15 iterations of the current design as I experimented with layout always coming back. I’ll have to post them in a gallery at some point.
It’s been 6 months since I started my sabbatical on 23rd of October 2009. Without a doubt this single best decision I’ve ever taken in my life was to press pause, take a step back and review where I was and where I wanted to be.
The plan for the sabbatical was actually very fluid. When I was asked what I wanted to do with the time off, my general response was that I wanted to take some time to calm down, work on my graphic novel and see the family. That was actually all true. Most of my family questioned my decision to start work on my graphic novel in Saida, Lebanon. I’ve lived all my life in a major city, Athens & London. Saida is anything but a major city. It’s a village. Made of concrete. With little in the way of excitement. What the hell was I doing?
I was taking the time to sit at my desk, do some drawing, live in my own apartment, look at the Mediterranean every morning, run on the beach, avoid public transport, see the family, eat some good food, discover a whole new city. I was changing my routine. How long was I going to last? I wasn’t sure. What was interesting to me is that every month I kept extending my stay, against all odd. What can I say, the place has an irresistible charm. Other elements in my life also started happening (but I’m not ready to share those just yet, but needless to say I’m very happy with the way things are going on that front).
So I decided to look at the option for staying here would be. Could I find a job here? The truth is I did the interview rounds in March and April of this year. It was an amazing period for me, only because I’ve NEVER done a real interview apart from the one I took when I was trying to get into Arup. The difference of course is that i was in a unique position. I wasn’t looking to leave Arup because I didn’t like the place. The places i was going to interview had to basically CONVINCE me that I wanted to join them. I wasn’t looking for a way out of Arup. I was looking for a way into Lebanon. The thing was I wasn’t willing to compromise.
Finally after several interviews and even spending an entire week in the office, I’ve decided to take a position at Pierre Dammous and Partners. It’s a small practice and feels more like a family than anything else. The great thing about it all is of course that I have a great opportunity to actually start building something around me. It’s interesting in contrast I suppose to Arup where things take a bit of time and have to go through a greater hierarchy (the nature of a large organisation no doubt - although it does it much better than others).
So in a nutshell, I’m moving to Lebanon, having never spent more than a month, I’m now poised to stay here for the next few years at least. It’s a massive transition for me which bring a great deal of opportunity for me.
So what did I actually achieve during this period off? I gained a great deal, no doubt, but what did I actually CREATE? Well most of these are documented in a fashion on this site. For my own benefit I’ll list them here.
Aitus Moralis - This was my focus until the end of March. I would work on it for at least 6-8 hours a day. It wasn’t as intense as I would have liked it to be, but I was learning how to do this. The final outcome is the first draft of the entire graphic novel, character descriptions and environment descriptions. I’ve also begun design many of the characters (of which there are over 50 in this the first of the series.
Logos - I finished off a couple of logos in the time off. These were mainly side projects that I wanted to do. I did a Habari logo (which obviously wasn’t adopted, but was fun to make). I did a ViaSound logo for my friend Yanni (not sure if he’s using it). I finished a Vivid Creations logo for my cousin Yahya (who I know is using it, and has used it in a great way).
POP4 - I completed several pages of this little idea of a comic. It’s still on the cards to continue, however the truth is I need to get into a rythm, with work and life in general, which I don’t have. The concept is simple, split an A4 piece of paper into 4 vertical panels. Spend 1hour a day on each panel. Don’t think about it before hand, don’t think about it after it’s done. The whole point is to get some art done, in an hour. I stopped the routine as I was working on Aitus Moralis, but I will be getting into this hopefully once i get back to Lebanon and start work again.
Broken Kode - I completed this design that you are looking at right now. The thing about this design is that it’s actually pretty solid (in my mind at least). So much so that every time I go to mess about with it, i end up going back to this single column, completely minimalist design. One of the great parts of this design is that I have been concentrating on the content itself and created a framework for myself to actually bring the content to the front. The illustrations page is one i am very fond of.
Family Portrait - This was a really fun side project. With the house being renovated in Lebanon, there was an empty door which we decided to try and do something about. The solution was to have a stained glass portrait of the family. It took me something like 3 months to finally get the drawing done (after many failed attempts) but the final outcome is unique.
Artwork - I did a decent amount of artwork at the start of the sabbatical, which ultimately I won’t be able to use (maybe in the making of companion book to Aitus Moralis). However one of the greatest aspects of this sabbatical is that I FINALLY achieved my own style. No more am I a bad copy of such and such artist. You can see influences sure, but I strive for my own path now, which has been a long time coming. My main weakness at the moment is facial expressions so I’ll be doing a lot of drills in the coming year to sort this out, because it’s a terrible weakness which I have to resolve.
There is soo much to talk about, and even more to show. The coming year I will be beaming the ‘Kode from it’s second spiritual home. It will no longer be out of London as it has been since it’s start, but rather from Beirut.
If you’re subscribed to the site, then you’ve no doubt been bombarded this last day with 15 or so ‘new’ posts. These are all part of the illustration section which I’ve been putting together. Regulars of the site for a while will recognise a lot of these images, however there are several new ones and others that have never been shown in this way.
I kept thinking about the best way to put this section together, as there is a lot of stuff I’ve got on my harddisc that’s not seen the soft glow of the internet in years. Hopefully because of the general ease with which this section is maintained, I’ll be constantly uploading images to this section, because I’ve always believed that all art needs to be shown, because it gives you perspective on where you where artistically before and how much you’ve improved in the time passed.
I’m travelling down to the homeland (for lack of better word, Lebanon) tomorrow morning. It’s the first time in nearly 5 years and much I’m sure has changed (or maybe nothing has changed). Either way, expect a bit of radio silence from the ‘kode in the forthcoming week, while I sort out our home down there, the internet and EVERYTHING else that I need to deal with (really boring shit like bank accounts, passport, identity cards, buying a car, boring shit, but essential shit).
See you on the other side.
I can finally start talking about my sabbatical, as last night was the first time I felt slightly restless, which basically means that I’m calm and my brain isn’t being bombarded with work related thoughts. Until 2 weeks into my ‘sabbatical’ I was still having the most boring work dreams you can imagine. I’d wake up with a bit of a smile on my face since I didn’t need to do anything with that dream and my reality was the opposite, for once.
Now I’m back to not remembering my dreams, which means we can hunker down to get some work done. Maybe that’s why I’ve woken up at 5:30, because my body is telling me:
Get up you fool, we’ve got work to do. You’ve been sleeping till 9 for too long you lazy bum.
The sabbatical effectively starts today (at least in my mind). There are a couple of things that I’m hoping to achieve in this short period of time that I have in front of me and 6:30 in the morning is a good time to start as any.
After a moment of pure madness, I went back to WordPress, only to find that actually the creature comforts that I had become accustomed to in Habari were not present. It had such a detrimental effect on me that I could even post small links. The bookmarklets didn’t work, the thing felt heavy and I couldn’t wrap my head around the various elements of the code that had passed me by.
I’ll be writing more about Habari in the coming months as there definitely is a lot of work being done, but it just needs a bit of, consolidation of sorts.
If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then have a look at the site, which looks a little bit different, as I’ve also updated to version 9.
What’s the reason for going back to WordPress? Simply the plugins and documentation available to me to actually do what I need to get done. Yes I could called on the Habari community, but I just want to get on with things. Trying to write something like P2 for Habari is definitely out of my scope of knowledge. I’m not a developer. I’m not even a web designer. This is something of a hobby that I enjoy playing around with. But it should get in my way, and unfortunately due to my inadequacies as a developer Habari was getting in my way. I really really hope that in the future I’ll be able to make a proper and permenant jump over to Habari, but now is not the time (I did attempt it for a year, but my site looked more like it was created in 2006 rather than in 2009).
I am more than happy to play around with this and make it work for me, slowly moulding it and shaping it to what I want it to do, but writing this from scratch would be too much of a pain in my ass.
So here it is, comments are back online (for now) and I’m sure there is going to be a load more things to come in the not too distant future.
Although not an immense milestone by most blogs estimation (especially the professional blogs which pay you by the post), I think 1300 posts on ‘Kode is a significant achievement to sit back and take stock of. 1300 posts is roughly 216 posts per year, which is a little over 1 post every two days for the past six years. Truth is, there have been some pretty busy days and some very quiet days (nay months) over the years but overall there has been a consistent output of ideas, thoughts, critism and links over the years.
Changes
Even with the rise of twitter, I’ve still managed to keep this website alive. The truth is using it as an extended bookmarking tool has kept it fresh and alive in my mind and effectively kept the site relevant. See many of my recent posts (in the past year or so) could have easily been covered as tweets. The thing is I love my site. I like using it as a tool to communicate my ideas.
However the biggest change I’ve made here this year is removed comments. Comments were really sporadic in general, and the only thing I could count on was bloody spam. Getting rid of the spam has been great, but of course it’s also meant that if in fact I wanted to have a discussion with anyone then it’d have to come from an email, or on twitter.
Design
On the design aspect of things, I’ve never been more happy with the general look of the website than I am now. It’s like 5 years of experimentation have brought me to this site. In many respects it’s as minimal as the very first iteration of the site. The truth is the site doesn’t have any wow factors, no drawings, no clever javascript, nothing of the sort. What it lacks in those bells and whistles, I feel it makes up in form and function. Refined design.
Future
Obviously no idea what the future will hold, but it’ll involve a lot more art coming onto the site. I’ve been drawing more this year than I have,….well ever. Obviously my biggest concern is finding a solution that actually works for me as well as Asaph and Habari have this year.