Steve Cochrane

I heard an especially inspiring story from the frequently inspiring podcast The Sound of Young America the other day, and I thought it was worth sharing.

It’s from an interview with “internet troubadour” Jonathan Coulton, an ex–software engineer who decided to quit his job and become a full–time musician.

Jesse Thorn: You [quit your job] just as your wife was pregnant with your first baby. Wasn’t it?

Coulton: Well, it was after she was born… well, actually, we probably had the conversation when she was still pregnant. But, yeah, that was a big part of the impetus as well, because it was sort of a wake–up call in terms of my own mortality. I don’t know if other people feel that way, but that was one of the things I felt the most keenly. It was like, oh, wow, I get it, now I’m a dad, my dad just became a grandfather, and my grandfather is dead. So, I see where this is going, you know? (laughs) And on top of it, I felt a new pressure to be a good role model. I started looking at myself through my daughter’s eyes. What would I see if I were my daughter?

The answer is that I would see a guy who had aspirations, and who maybe had some talent, and just never took the chance, and instead got bogged down and stuck behind the safety and comfort of a job that was not really what he wanted to do. I didn’t want to look like that to her, and I wanted her to have the ability to make the brave choice. And in order to do that, I needed to make the brave choice.

You can listen to the whole interview and a bunch of his songs at the TSOYA website. In a few months, I’ll be seeing Coulton perform in front of potentially 50,000+ people at the Penny Arcade Expo, so he seems to be doing pretty well for himself now.

His story reminded me of the heart-rending “Things I’m Going to Do” page in the scrapbook from Up. This is a man who is bravely filling in the remaining pages of his life’s scrapbook exactly how he wants to.

I have emerged victorious from my month-long ActionScript adventure, and I owe it to this tutorial on how to read trace() statements from your browser.

Typically when coding ActionScript, you run trace() statements to output debug messages like any other compiled language, or like console.log() for Firebug. But when the SWF runs in the browser, those trace() statements are no longer visible, which simply isn’t good enough for me when I’m running something with a lot of background API calls like Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash. Things can behave very differently in the browser.

After going through the tutorial to set this up, which doesn’t take long, those trace() statements will output to a log file that you can view as it changes. Not only is this incredibly useful for fixing bugs, but you get major geek points for having lots of text scrolling by in Console.app, the geekiest of all apps.

People occasionally ask me why I work on the web for a living, and why I’m so passionate about it. Here’s what I tell them.

In short, the web is magic. You write some simple code in an inexpensive text editor, and when it’s ready (or not) you upload those bits to a server somewhere. You probably don’t even know where your server is, but it doesn’t matter. In that instant, anyone, anywhere in the world can type a tiny address into their web browser and instantly view a perfect reproduction of your work. Provided the server can handle the capacity, even millions of people could view your site at once.

The geographical distances or the limited materials that used to restrict an idea no longer apply. And it gets better: you’re not a special case here. Anyone who can afford a computer has the power to do this. There has been no better time in history to be creative.

Now, expedited by an economic recession, we’re seeing the effects of this sudden leap forward. Multi-billion dollar industries who were doing just fine even a decade ago have had the rug pulled out from under their feet. It’s easy to pop some popcorn and get a little schadenfreude out of watching these lumbering dinosaurs fall, but either way, when the dust settles, we’ll be in a much better place. Now we’re in the interesting part, where we figure out how to get there.

So it’s easy to see why I’m utterly fascinated with the web. I’m no history buff, but it’s probably the most significant human advancement since the printing press. I want to be involved, to watch the web grow, and hopefully, to help make it even better.

It’s been two and a half years since the debut of stevecochrane.com v3. You know, the one with the owl.

It was a textbook case of over-design and I worked on it intermittently for roughly eight months. I made a lot of mistakes, and I always enjoy when people that I respect publicly acknowledge and laugh at their own mistakes, so here goes.

A web design is not an excuse for the designer to show off their skills. When I saw Jeffrey Zeldman speak at An Event Apart once, one of the many brilliant things he talked about was what he calls the “guitar solo” approach to web design. This is where the designer does a bunch of crazy, superfluous stuff to show off how awesome they are to fellow designers. This was exactly what I did, and the result was pretty clunky and vague.

Don’t start a series that you have no intention of supporting. You know the giant tagline at the top, “Web standards make me want to rock out”? That’s a play on a lyric from Art Brut’s “Modern Art”, and my intention was to have a series of lyrics twisted into web jokes. “I’ll think of more later,” I said. That never happened, and the first one stayed up for the life of the site.

Don’t publish a site until everything is final. Obvious, right? Well, I spent so much time on the index page that I got impatient and said “let’s do this thing,” slapped together the rest, and shipped it. The other parts of the site, like the single post view, the comments, and pretty much everything other than the index, never looked quite right. Also, the About page has been “Coming Soon!” for two and a half years.

The best creative tools are the ones that stay out of your way so that you can do your work. The current blog is built with WordPress, which is a good platform, but it requires too much maintenance for me. Most times I log in I get prompted to upgrade, and the essential caching plugins wreak havoc on my file system, wasting even more time. So I’m experimenting with the impeccably designed Tumblr and planning for a possible switch, in the hopes that its simplicity will encourage me to write more regularly.

Do something memorable. This is one I’m currently struggling with. Even though it’s basically window dressing, people like the owl and the scrolling speech bubbles, and they remember my site because of them. I want to cut it because I feel it’s very distracting to a reader, but maybe the best answer here is to just tone it down a bit. But ideally I would do something that is memorable and that has functional value.

Now I need to work on some design iterations. Also, maybe not have so many posts that are all “me, me, me.”

I enjoy fancy t-shirts. This is no secret.

Yet for some reason, I’ve never shared the love here. So, here are three personal favorites that help show off your design knowledge, spark geeky conversations, and look stylish simultaneously. I own all three of these and people like them.

Typography: Ampersand tee by House Industries.

Grids: Grid Systems tee by YouWorkForThem.

The Golden Ratio: Ratio M tee by Brooklyn Industries.

So, this past Saturday I designed a new site, Clay Street Media, for the parent company of VidSF (which I haven’t gotten around to writing about yet), it’s in the portfolio now, etc. More importantly, it has inspired a rare Long-Form Post, which follows.

This is the first site I can think of in a while where I mostly designed on autopilot, resorting to a bag of tricks I’ve been building lately with each of my recent design exploits.

• Helvetica Neue for sans serif, Georgia for serif. Helvetica Neue is very similar to Helvetica but is made for screen viewing, and the few times I’ve compared the two I thought Neue looked ever-so-slightly better.
• A general aversion to bold type. I’ll typically emphasize text with a slightly higher-contrast color rather than use bold, though recently I’ve been growing fond of bold Helvetica Neue. In short: for Georgia, italic is nice-looking, bold is ugly. For Helvetica Neue, bold is nice-looking, italic is ugly as it doesn’t seem to be a true italic.
• Obnoxiously huge one-sentence intros. It’s never a good thing to show up to a website and think “Hmmm, OK, what’s all this about then?”. So I try to make it easy by summing up the entire project in a single sentence and by making that the first thing that is seen.
• Tiny section headers in a contrasting type style, that poke out a bit to the left to ease scanning and break up an otherwise monotonous uniform left margin.
• Usually flat colors and type with very minimal imagery. Though this is usually more due to time constraints than to a fear of imagery. The site you’re looking at right now is, of course, an exception, and its current incarnation is two years old.

Are these useful tricks? Do they typically enhance the site’s effectiveness? I think so, yes, but it’s important not to resort to the same old tricks time after time. There’s a great bit from The Creative Habit (which I highly recommend to anyone who makes things for a living) where Twyla Tharp writes “practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.” It feels good to practice what you’re already skilled at, but when something is mastered, it’s time to move on to something new, however difficult that may feel, and however fearful you may be of making mistakes in public.

For my next project I’m going to use imagery, perhaps break up an otherwise-orderly grid with something like our friend the owl there. And a new typeface I haven’t used much, maybe Gill Sans or Times. Or maybe go wild and try out sIFR. And maybe I’ll let the user figure out what the site means to them, instead of screaming at them what I think it should be. Because if I’m not trying anything new, I’m not going anywhere.

Now that I’m attempting to soundtrack a friend’s upcoming video game, I thought it time for my musician alter ego to have a proper home.

This was a fun design task, as it was an exceedingly simple single-page HTML/CSS-only site, and I gave myself the artificial restriction of a 3-hour time limit. Normally I overwhelm myself by considering every possibility, but this time it was pretty much all instinctual, and it turned out well. There are of course far more ambitious ideas for it but for now it’s off to a modest start, just like the project itself.

The nice little embedded music player is 1 Pixel Out’s Audio Player WordPress plugin, modified to work in a non-WordPress site with this tutorial from Mindy McAdams. This Boagworld tutorial was also helpful in making the fixed footer.