Colophon
I like colophons. Geeky publishers O’Reilly have them at the back of their books, describing the mating habits of the animals they use to illustrate their covers, and the fonts they use, stuff like that. The word comes from the Greek meaning “summit” or “finishing touch”.
Graphics
The serpent logo was drawn by Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule. More about it here.
The cheeky goat in the bottom right, came from the brilliant free stock images site, stock.xchng. It’s by Paulo Freitas from Portugal.
Typography
These days I am mostly using (in print and in graphic text on the web) the Adobe Caslon Pro and Franklin Gothic typefaces. Actual text on the web uses the faithful standards, Verdana and Georgia, where possible.
Software
Behind the scenes, this site is powered by WordPress, the excellent free blogging / site management software. That means the language is PHP and the database is MySQL.
To build the front-end XHTML/CSS I use a few of the usual applications big in web design. Here’s the ones you might not know about:
- Nick Bradbury’s excellent CSS editor TopStyle is hard to top. Not 100% perfect, but closer than most. After getting fed up with Dreamweaver’s bloat, I now use it for my XHTML editing, too, and it serves admirably.
- Mozilla Firefox isn’t just good for surfing, it’s got some indispensible extensions for web developers and designers.
- The nifty little EyeDropper always comes in handy.
Inspiration
I like coming up with things and then finding out that incredibly well-paid “experts”, after much expensive research, have decided on the same approach. That said, I dislike the fear of being influenced—any kind of shutdown of receptivity masquerading as concern for originality. Not to mention the denial of influence. The following people and sites are my lifelines to the craft of web building:
