Because it’s type-related I couldn’t resist waiting another day before publishing this… …Yesterday I was going through an old un-named sketch book. Right at the back were these beautiful hand-drawn versal letters and an entire page of weaving ornaments: Versals, or drop capitals are large and often ornately decorated capital letters marking the opening of a running body of [...]

I’ve arrived in Germany. I was pleasantly surprised to find the partner of the friend I am staying with to be a collector and dealer in printed and drawn antiquities — everything from postcards, newspapers, books of course and original drawings. He has reputable collection and much of it happens to live next door to my bedroom. He recently [...]

Body modification is a permanent or semi-permanent alteration of the body for non-medical reasons — think spiritual, societal, BDSM play, aesthetic or practical. Body modification has been in practice for at least two thousand plus years — Ötzi the Iceman was found with a fairly large earlobe piercing (1–000 gauge; 7–11mm) and 57 carbon tattoos. Yesterday I had another [...]

This will most likely be old news for most — Waugh Partners released the first Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report following the census they conducted over the last year. This is it: Industry, page 8 of the report. Now with KLEPAS.ORG resurrected I wanted to briefly touch on it and entice those who haven’t yet seen it to download [...]

It slipped by me that just last week — a few days before Canberra’s first BarCamp — Eric Meyer wrote an article responding to Johnathan Snook’s announcement that he doesn’t use reset stylesheets. Following that came Jens Meiert’s arguments that reset style sheets are bad. I can see where Jens is coming from but don’t see any compelling reasons that would [...]

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of presenting my first presentation on typgraphy, at Canberra’s very first BarCamp. The talk was titled “Beautiful Web Typography: 7 tips on de-sucking the web” and is available via: Slideshare; Slideshare as a PDF (requires an account); here as a PDF; and thanks to Nathanael, as a MP3 audio file. I think I crammed too much into the [...]

Over a year ago four of us — Andrew Boyd, Nathanael Boehm, Stephen Collins and myself — sat around a café here in Woden, Canberra discussing the logistics of running Canberra’s first BarCamp. Two days ago, April 19th we finally ended up kicking off BarCampCanberra1, here at the ANU. With over sixty people we had three streams going throughout the day [...]

I’m back. Finally. So, a little about the design — I decided quite early I wanted to stick to a solid grid foundation. The website is built around four columns, each columns measuring 200 pixels with 25-pixel wide gutters. To ensure content doesn’t sit beside browser window borders I’ve also installed 40-pixel wide left and right hand margins giving [...]