Jayeblog

So I've been in the city for three weeks now, and I've discovered that one of my favorite things about this place is the sheer volume of signage around me. Because signage means typography, and looking at others' typography is fascinating.

Seriously, type is everywhere. A type geek who keeps his eyes open around here can learn a ton just by observation. Face selection, placement & positioning, integration with the overall design--examples are abundant, both good and bad.

The MTA information posters in the Metro trains (in my experience, posted frequently in the first car of a train)... (read more)

I was reminded today at work that some people actually read my blog, so maybe it's time for an update. Things have changed since March.

For starters: I'm in New York City, working at R/GA, a digital advertising firm in the Hell's Kitchen area. They do all kinds of good work, for a lot of different brands. I'm on the tech team, doing front-end development, mostly Javascript and CSS. Of course, since I'm doing work for clients, there are rules about things I can and cannot talk about in a public forum. So, instead of worrying about any... (read more)

Ach, it has been an unbearably long time since I last Jayeblogged. I promise, I'll be back to it very soon. In the meantime, check out some of the stuff I've been doing:

My iPhone site is completed. Only viewable on Mobile Safari.

RITI Mobile is complete, too. It's an improv game library and random word generator, and it's really awesome. It's technically viewable on a desktop, but you really want to use an iPhone or an iTouch for this one too.

I designed some print media for the new teas we're getting at the... (read more)

Today, I looked at a whole bunch of .edu websites. I mean a whole bunch. Using Wikipedia's List of American Institutions of Higher Education, I looked at the front page of every single listed college in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The final number of pages visited came to over six hundred--how my puny little internet connection managed to feed me all of that data in under three hours, I'll never know. But I visited every single page, and I picked my top ten favorites of the whole bunch.... (read more)

Javascript sucks. I mean it really sucks. It sucks to code and it sucks to debug, it's clunky, and the notion of Javascript cross-browser compatibility is a joke. I often ignored Javascript altogether in my early days, using the classic "well, a lot of users turn it off, so what's the point?" argument to cover my ass. In the face of the latest W3Schools statistics, however, it's clear that excuse no longer holds water--as of January of 2008, the W3C claims that up to 95% of their visitors are supporting Javascript in their browsers.

All numbers aside, the... (read more)