After six months in the new house, I came home yesterday to find a letter from the City of Seattle Department of Design, Construction and Land Use that read:

A City of Seattle inspector has noted that violations of local ordinances exist on the premises identified above.

To avoid receiving a formal “Notice of Violation” which may carry penalties of $15 to $75 per day, please take action to correct the violation(s) checked below.

x Cut and remove any vegetation constituting a fire, health or safety hazard

x Cut and remove any vegatation on the property or the adjacent parking strips which overhangs any public sidewalk within 8 feet of the ground.

You can’t tell from the perspective of their enclosed photo, but my 6’3” frame had to jump to reach those branches. My guess is that a nosy neighbor reported the folks across the street (you know, the ones with waist-high weeds, two shopping carts parked in the front yard with a potpourri of empties scattered around the premises, who yell at each other from two feet away while sucking down longnecks — so unsophisticated, I mean really) and while the city was out on their cleanup crusade, reveled in our low-hanging fruit, so to speak.

Or it may have been that the city was had grown accustomed to citing our residence for petty violations — before our ownership — for noise disturbances and the like. When wife & I first looked at the house, we loved it for its charm and spaciousness, but it was rough around the edges and required a lot of maintenance, work that we’ve only scratched upon so far. There were a lot of guitars and Marshall stacks and soundboards throughout the house, nothing out of the ordinary for this city. We made an offer that afternoon.

The Name-Dropping Part of the Story
The next day our real-estate agent called back to say the offer was accepted, and by the way, the current owner is Dan Peters, the drummer of Mudhoney (and former fill-in drummer for Nirvana). So that explained the collection of recording equipment in the basement, the Alice Cooper doll in the bathtub, the Touch Me, I’m Sick sticker on the fridge. They were selling after ten years in the house. On a later visit, I mentioned to Dan that I’d seen his band play in Omaha about eight or nine years ago. “At the bowling alley?” “Yes.” Wife & I laughed at the coincidence and fancied images of past Northwest punk rocker parties in our house with Eddie Vedder stumbling down the uneven stairs, Kurt & Courtney bickering on the porch, Chris Cornell scarfing down potato chips, leaning on the kitchen counter. But no such evidence arose. All that’s left is a well-insulated practice room in the basement where you can scream and never be heard.

So last night I trimmed back the tree to appease the Inspector and any nine-foot pedestrians who walk up our street. While making our mayor proud, I noticed those neighbors had finally harvested the field of wheat they’d been growing in the front yard all spring. How irritating it is to be judged. How even more disparaging it is to judge. These thoughts never crossed my mind when I rented. Each month I paid my rent, and thought about the next place I was going to live.

When rummaging through a drawer I came across this gift a previous neighbor left on my car window. For all these months I’ve been trying to figure out what the torn part said. “There is no food?” “There is nothing more absurd?” Or maybe, “There is no extra space behind my big fucking SUV for your little economical turd.”

Safari 1.0 was released for the Mac today, which marks the first General Announcement of an Apple-made web browser. Some visitors (thanks and thanks) had reported a major bug in the way Contact Sheet’s homepage was rendered in the previous Safari Beta — completely lacking a vertical scrollbar.

With the 1.0 announcement I thought I’d take the time to investigate the problem, seeing how my bug reports to Safari went unanswered (the bug still appears in 1.0). I looked at my stylesheets, then HTML, and found the problem with a bit of JavaScript, specifically a document.write method to detect the user’s screen size that caused the scrollbar to disappear — clearly a Safari bug. I altered the placement of the code slightly and the scrollbar now appears.

I didn’t hop on this problem when it was first brought to my attention because (a) Safari is a beta browser (b) since I now sport XHTML and CSS validity, it was likely to be a browser bug (see a) and (c) only 1% - 2% of the daily users use Safari — although this is likely to increase with the 1.0 release, and with my bug workaround in place.

Which begs the question, at what point should web designers care about site/browser compatibility? Is it purely about the percentage of users? Compliance with web standards? At most places I’ve worked it seems that folks use the sheer volumes when creating policy. But if “only” 1% of your users are viewing with Netscape, 1% of a million are a lot of people viewing a potentially imperfect site. With the browser market pie chart becoming more fragmented — a good thing, mind you — designers will have to consciously draw the line somewhere. And we already do with old versions.

So, what are your browser compliance criteria?

Some photo collections I’ve been enjoying lately:

1. The Cross Atlantic Report (CAR) just released their May photos. This is a great idea, and if and when I move to Portugal, I wouldn’t mind participating. One nit: the photos are too small.
2. Anything and Everything: a collection of Lomo photographs. Nice display mechanism (and good use of Flash, except you can’t refer to a photograph by its URL).
3. The 800x600 Project, where the photographer picks a subject, selects 64 photos, and crams them into an 800x600 grid. My favorite is 64 shots of my workhorse bicycle.
4. A few old Adam Curry photographs (one of the original MTV VJs for you American-pop-culture-illterate folk)
5. And don’t forget the 10 Golden Rules of Lomography that all farm league photographers should review every now and again (well-designed site, too!)

This weekend I searched unsuccessfully for a Movable Type plug-in that would create a PDF version of Contact Sheet. We know full well that The Web Is Not Print, and even more that Print Is Not the Web (thanks to Dave S. for the reminder). With that in mind, I hacked together my own PHP script bringing you the short history of Contact Sheet in PDF.

The links are gone, the graphics are gone, every bit of formatting is gone making it one bland robotic document. I’m not in the business of creating an HTML to PDF converter, so I threw the CSS out with the bathwater. This is pure text and line breaks, baby.

So does this have any useful purpose? It’s good for saving a simple copy of your weblog, or packaging your blog into one portable file. It’s great for printing out your blog in one fell swoop to save for the year when harddrives are obsolete. I’ve come across great sites wishing there was one PDF that I could grab, saving me the pain of motion-sickness reading that much text on screen.

(Interestingly, two proponents of web standards that I’ve read recently each relate their standardization concerns to current technology becoming obsolete.

In the above Owen Brigg’s design rant:

Just like much of NASA’s 1976 Viking data. NASA can no longer read the format those tapes are in. Researchers are having to review that Mars data by digging through paper print-outs that older scientist hadn’t thrown away.

Jeffrey Zeldman says:

My studio was built around an Akai 12-track, an excellent machine, but with a proprietary format… A year into it, Akai changed their tape format. My master tapes became museum pieces. Then the machine broke down and I couldn’t easily arrange repairs or get parts. This experience would later make me highly receptive to the advantages of common technological standards, as in Web standards.

…but what we really need are less standards and more paper printouts!)

Formatting aside, the main stink is that links don’t work (at least in the printed version, of course), severely limiting the context of many blogs.

I used the R&OS PDF classes, but there are a lot more free PHP-PDF tools available, some with XML capabilities that might be a better way to retain more of the styles and formatting. For this example, I created a new MT template, stripped out all the HTML, and fed it to the PHP script which was an altered version of the sample that came with the package.

If others are interested I’ll make it available, once I peel away the duct tape and rubber bands holding it together. But I said it before and I’ll say it again: it ain’t pretty.

I wrote a quick little script and let it go for ~36 hours to find out that these are the only alpha-numeric two-letter domains available in the .com .net .org suffixes according to the Internic Whois Directory:

75.org ac.org fs.org h9.org mw.org

nq.org o7.org qd.org yo.org z9.org

However, most registrars won’t let you register two-letter .org domains anymore to comply with a new ICANN/PIR restriction.

There are no alpha-only three letter domains available. Zqx.net? Taken. Ywj.org? Gone. But there are 3777 .com, 22,176 .org and 16,562 .net alpha-numeric combinations still waiting to be snatched up.

John Gruber writes an excellent article on the Trackback system and why a system of referrals (in place at his site) or a centrally located link collector like Technorati is a better solution. I don’t use any of the methods listed above. Usually when I respond to something that a person has written, I find the easiest, lo-tech method to be a quick e-mail letting them know.

One problem with the referral system (assuming that it was used everywhere): when Contact Sheet refers to Daring Fireball’s Trackback article (as done so above), Contact Sheet will show up in Daring Fireball’s referral logs. So then a Daring Fireball visitor clicks on the reference to Contact Sheet, and now Daring Fireball has referred back to Contact Sheet when making no mention of the site (other than simply appearing in the referral logs).

Another: it’s time-sensitive. Since the original referral from Contact Sheet likely came from my home page (and not the permalink), you will click on Daring Fireball’s referral to Contact Sheet and see no mention of it if you arrive after it’s scrolled off the home page.

There is a lot of cross-fire and extra noise without any context or control.

Technorati is great, but as John mentions, it’s centrally located and I rarely go to the trouble of typing in an article’s URL to see its reach. Someday I may employ a method of referrals out of interest, with the noted limitations.

In the meantime, I will continue to write e-mails when I mention you here.

I love the preliminary research before a project begins. So I picked up The Education of a Graphic Designer to start a personal investigation while I consider a master’s degree. It’s turned out to be the perfect book to help organize thoughts around graduate design school — what should be valued in design education, which trickles down to reasons for enrolling and what to expect from a good institution.

What follows are some rough notes from the first essay, Education in an Adolescent Profession, by Katherine McCoy.

In short, design education is heavily dilluted because:

1. There are no universally recognized guidelines of what qualifies one as a professional graphic designer
2. The focus is too often on applied design where students learn how to respond to common design problems (akin to flipping through CA) instead of the underlying design fundamentals at play
3. Few colleges understand that design is not simiply the commercialization of fine art

Bauhaus Design Fundamentals: Correct
Architecture was the earliest design field and the only one to exist 100 years ago. The Bauhaus were the first to lay ground rules, showing the need for a set of design fundamentals before addressing the pragmatic design need:

The Bauhaus Basic Course was the first in design education to declare that basic design principles underlie all design disciplines, that primary design education should begin with abstract problems to introduce these universal elements before students proceed to tackle programmatic design problems applied to specific scales, needs and media. This emphasis on abstraction and experimentation, and the rejection of accepted traditional formulas, represented a radical new attitude in education.

The Bauhaus method of design principles were slow to make their way to US schools and went through Switzerland before being adopted by major studios in the 1960’s and eventually taking root in Yale and other premier schools.

Based on objectivity and rationalism, this [Swiss] educational system produced a codified method that was easy to communicate to students, giving them a foundation for a visual design process and composition that went far beyond the superficial emulation of their heros.

But even today, the Bauhaus style of abstract experimentation is usually limited to introductory design survey courses, after which students are forced into a specialization where the simulation of real-world design ensues.

Master/Apprentice: Incorrect
Many schools emulate the master-apprentice model. The apprentice initially takes on the mechanics of the master’s work, taking on more and more craft as his skill progresses. Although more vocational than academic, this educational style maps more easily to the job market from the start, and is the driving force behind this method — to boost graduate employment rates. The main problem is that it’s not based on any kind of design standards, but the personal style of the master.

This lack of formalized method has been almost universal in our art schools and university art departments until recently. The typical approach has placed a premium on creativity, a flash of intuition, the Big Idea, and educators have encouraged this, through exposure to “samples and examples”… Graphic design magazines and competition annuals have been most students’ only resource. Emulating the work of renowned designers could be seen as a weak continuation of the master/apprentice system without the benefit of personal contact between student and master.

A nugget relevant to my personal quest:

Graduate study should never imitate professional practice; rather, it should challenge students to look deeply into the discipline and into themselves to connect design to its culture, its history, its users, its society, and its technology

And some comments on what lies at the intersection of design and other disciplines that surfaced during a conversation I had with Dave Shea:

But we hear a continuing debate as to whether this profession should lean toward art or toward science. The most recent influences add a third contender to the art/science debate. Literary and critical theorists see design as a language to be read—that graphic design might be considered a form of visual literature.

Although all three orientations are preoccupied with communication and meaning, each stresses a different component of the sender-transmitter-receiver communication model. Design as art is concerned with personal content and expression; design as science is concerned with systematic presentation of objective information; and design as language is concerned with the audience’s reading or interpretation of text and content … Certainly, graphic design will be the richer for the exploration of all three directions.

More to follow.

Highlighting the intersection of design and rock ‘n roll, the Experience Music Project is running an exhibition entitled Paper Scissors ROCK: 25 Years of Northwest Punk Poster Design running through September 7th.

The idea of rock posters in a nice new museum seems a little out of context (come to think of it, the idea of a museum dedicated to rock’n’roll seems hopelessly restrained), but I’m still glad it’s happening. This review sums it up:

The problem with an exhibition of rock posters is that postering is messy, and exhibitions tend to be neat. This, in critical parlance, is a frame problem, and EMP has been saddled—and in turn, has saddled a few exhibitions—with a frame that is too bland, that tends to turn the chaotic, emotional experience of music into something neatly patted into a manageable shape.

In related news, the Stranger’s Poster of the Week has been added to the links page.

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine writes on the mag’s blogsite, Hit & Run:

The big danger in Monday’s FCC ruling is supposed to be that it will reduce the variety of opinions, views and commentary represented in the media, and I’m beginning to think that must be true: Since Monday, all the commentary I’ve heard about the FCC ruling says the same thing: The move will reduce the variety and opinions represented in the media.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The move will reduce the variety and opinions represented in the media.

I read this Zlog interview with David Shea, and, while I respect his opinion a great deal, vehemently disagree with one point.

Which languages interest you the most and why?

None of ‘em, and here’s my reason.

I spend a good chunk of my day in Photoshop or Illustrator or whichever graphic tool I’m using at the time. The common thread between the various design packages from Adobe, Macromedia, and Quark are that they all rely on underlying data structures (including PostScript in some cases) that enable me to build my imagery with WYSIWYG tools.

Not once, ever, do I even have the option of looking at the code. I’m kept as far away from it as possible, and let the control over it stay where it belongs - in the capable hands of the software.

This is an incorrect analogy because the designers (engineers) of Photoshop did have access to the code and were in complete control of every behavior in the Photoshop environment. The end user of the design tool shouldn’t care about the underlying code for the same reason that an end user of a web site shouldn’t be exposed to its code. But those designing should care a great deal.

And that’s the way it should be with the web. It makes no sense for a designer to code; they should design. The fundamental layout of a page should be completely hidden from the person building it, otherwise it stifles their creativity.

I’m making the assumption that code = HTML/markup and not logic.

When you’re designing a web site you’re also (intentionally or not) designing the behavior — the way the page behaves inside the browser and the interaction of the page to the user. How else can you accurately control the design of your product if you’re not constructing the pieces that make up the layout? Sitting behind the coder dictating every nuance just doesn’t cut it. This behavior design comes through subtly in the structure: fixed versus variable width pages greatly affect the design; or blatantly: rollover images, opening new browser sessions in hrefs, etc.

When I start adapting my layout to fit a design I know I can code, the tools are getting in the way of my creativity.

Web design is the only design discipline in which the designer can also build from start to finish. Not in print design (usually), industrial design or architecture are they so lucky. If you follow some variation of the Sketchpad -> Illustrator -> Photoshop -> HTML editor process, eliminating the last step of the design process is not suppressing design, but following it through into a realized product. This amount of design control should not be wasted. Even if it’s just the initial templates to be chopped up and reapportioned by a web programmer, those templates serve as the foundation of the site from which all coding and structure follows. Obviously one should never begin any project by coding HTML.

How would a designer know what was possible as a web design layout without knowing the code? Early in my career print designers would offer advice on specific designs that were not at all transferrable to the web, with (graphical) fonts spanning photos intersecting body copy that was impossible in 3.0 browsers and impractical in today’s updated browsers because they were ignorant to how the pages were laid out and how the code worked.

This is how its still done at design agencies all the time and is a completely foreign concept to me. Throughout jobs at large and small companies I’ve been fortunate enough to have never belonged to a creative team larger than six or seven people and have avoided assembly-line design entirely. Maybe I’m just a control freak — I don’t trust others to fully execute my design vision for a site and maintain structural integrity when the “site builders” join the game in the fourth quarter. But to me, web design is a bridge between art and science where design and code are inseparable elements of the media in which we’re communicating.

Thanks to a little help from Zeldman and liberal use of the w3c XHTML validator, this site is finally XHTML Transitional.

The most uncomfortable part of switching to XHTML (in theory as well as practice) was changing the ampersand-separators in URL HREFs from & to &, thereby changing the URL’s physical location and trusting that all browsers going forward will properly translate this. Even scarier in a Microsoft-dominated world — who knows what they’ll do with standards in coming years. Nevertheless, it was a leap of faith that made me more uncomfortable than I’d like.

The other pesky item: what to do with image alt tags that are soley for aesthetics that have no accessibility value (such as the dividers between the buttons on the top nav of this page). Why must they contain an alt tag, other than for zen-of-perfection reasons to get the designer in the good habit of including them with every image and button? I’ve left them as empty quotes, which Lynx seems to ignore. Otherwise it’s just extra noise for text-only readers.

Other than these minor points, the arguments I’ve read from web standards folks for XHTML & CSS generated sites are overwhelming — the general shift towards XML, the ability to keep content separate from markup code and the bandwidth savings that results from the cached CSS, increased accessibility, wider interoperability of browsers and web devices — there’s really no reason not to make the leap.