Monthly archives for "August 2006"

Our congratulations go out to Ian White, ArDes’s lead programmer, who got married to Tessa Mae Peasgood on Wednesday! We wish them the absolute best.

Edit: Name changed from “Argument from Design” to “ArDes”.

Raja Sandhu has written a FAQ regarding the development of logo — or, more accurately, corporate identity — design.

It’s good to see someone else taking a rational approach to design — or, at least, as rational approach as one can take. Many, if not all of Raja’s comments reflect our own experience of corporate identity design. In fact Raja’s comments can be expanded to cover graphic design in general. A good read!

So Ian’s been extolling the virtues of the Mac text editor TextMate for some time now. I’ve been dubious, because I’m a long-time BBEdit user — I’m a big fan of BBEdit’s HTML palette. But in a brief session, Ian showed me how easy it was to added “snippets” of code for long-standing quirks: for instance, “curly quotes” and other typographic titbits.

So he sold me on the application, and I’m making a switch to TextMate. The creation of bundles of typographic and/or frequently-used (X)HTML will make my life a lot easier. If you’re a TextMate user, you may be interested in the bundle we’ve got available online. They may be very helpful.

For fear that they’ll look like this:

A little note on why we call our blog the “Mechanical Turk”. Pace Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we were drawn to the idea of something that appears to be artificial intelligence, but in reality is just a performance of human ingenuity. It speaks to what our web design & development is all about — work that looks very slick & polished but is the result of of craft.

You can read more about the actual Mechanical Turk on Wikipedia.

Update, 19 November 2008

As I noted elsewhere on the site, we finally got around to changing the title of the blog to “Falling Leaves”, given that the site is devoted to far more random things than the performance of human ingenuity.