Cameron Moll

Speaking at 2010 HOW Design Conference

published 11 March 2010

This year’s HOW Design Conference resumes in Denver, Colorado beginning June 9. Some of the brightest minds in the design industry, including Debbie Millman, Armin Vit, and Von Glitschka, will speak on topics that cover design inspiration, making the leap from print to web, copywriting, business plans, Photoshop tips, and much more.

I’ll be giving a reprise of Good vs. Great Design. This will be a repeat of last year’s session, but with new content that includes discussion about creative pausing, inspiration vs. influence, and the like.

I hope you’ll join us. Should you decide to, consider registering by tomorrow—that’s when the early bird discount ($200) ends. Plus, use discount code CM10 and you’ll save another $50 on the individual full-conference rate. This discount code is valid beyond tomorrow’s early-bird deadline.

I don’t get a kickback if you use my code, so I’m simply passing additional savings on to you. Further, I’ll be randomly selecting one person who uses my discount code to receive a free, signed copy of my Colosseo letterpress poster. And it’s likely I’ll have copies of the poster on-site available for purchase at the conference, as well.

Hope to see you in Denver.

Colosseo Letterpress Poster: Now Available

published 9 March 2010

This is a behind-the-scenes look at the printing (and making) of the Colosseo. Purchase a copy here.

Also, read a little more about the successes and failures of creating the video in the description on Vimeo.

New Design, New Host, and Tumblr: How, Why

published 8 March 2010

The malware attack(s) that my site suffered in recent weeks put into motion a series of changes which have been planned for some time now—some for a few months, some for a couple years.

What follows is a detailed explanation of the changes.

New Design

Over Christmas Break in 2007, I started two redesigns: One for Authentic Jobs and another for this site. The premise for this realign encompassed a concept that wasn’t original, but one that I felt better suited my style of blogging.

You see, I’ve always enjoyed posting links as much as I’ve enjoyed posting articles. My previous design, which was published in early 2004 (and which can still be seen by visiting the archives), split these two categories of content independently and gave far greater visual emphasis to articles. In reality, articles and links were nearly equal to one another in my mind.

As a result, the design I began more than two years ago attempted to marry articles with links and provide a continuous stream of content for the reader, whether by RSS or by visiting the site directly. Again, the concept isn’t original. This style of blogging was most likely pioneered by John Gruber and has been repeated several times over by others since then.

In fact, a few months ago I chatted with John and shared my intentions to be sure I wasn’t infringing on the content model he’s championed so successfully. In short, he was fine with it, and even had this to say:

Honestly, I love this format so much I wish *more* sites used it. There are so many sites I like but don’t *love* because they don’t allow themselves to simply link to something with a few words rather than craft a 250-word wrapper for every entry.

In addition to a content realign, the aesthetics were deserving of attention, too. Bear in mind the previous design stood for more than 6 years. However, for some time now I’ve had an itch to return to something more minimal; something that placed greater emphasis on the content and less on the aesthetics, especially given the content realign. And so the design became what you see today—light on aesthetics, but still very much a reflection of the branding elements I’ve created for myself over the years.

And about that Swiss emblem. I’d be remiss not to mention that, as I get flak for it from time to time. Here’s the deal: My grandfather was born in Switzerland. That makes me one-quarter Swiss. This is a far cry from being full-Swiss, such as the likes of Tina Roth Eisenberg. But for me, the Swiss emblem represents not only a heritage I’m proud of but also a culture of wonderful, minimalist design that I try to emulate in some of my projects. (After all, I still have relatives in the country and have visited the country twice, so I’m not that removed from the former homeland.)

New Host

I’ve been with Media Temple almost since this site began. I’ve been through the ups and downs of service outages through the years, and while no host on the planet has 100% uptime, I’ve been through enough to encourage me to move on. Some of you have had flawless experiences with Media Temple. I, unfortunately, have not been one of them.

This site, therefore, is now hosted on the same dedicated server as Authentic Jobs, hosted at The Planet. We’ve not had perfect service with them either, but overall it’s been a positive, reliable experience.

Of course, the Tumblr part is hosted by Tumblr, and that leads to…

On Tumblr

This could very well turn out to be a horrible mistake, or it could play out really well for me. There’s no way of finding out without giving it a go, and that’s precisely what I’m doing.

I’ve foregone Movable Type as the software that powers this site and have chosen Tumblr instead. In short, I don’t know that I need full-featured blogging software anymore, at least not for this site. And while there are many great blogging/CMS platforms out there—WordPress, Squarespace, Harmony, and the like—I chose Tumblr because it makes customizing and posting almost as easy as Twitter. Frankly, most days that’s all I have time for.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t disadvantages to using Tumblr. Some are minimal, such as the lack of curly quotes and using an <i> element instead of <em> in the text. Others are more substantial, such as having little control over the software itself. Further, I’m still trying to iron out domain name issues so that “cameronmoll.com” stays pegged in the address bar, rather than the Tumblr URL. Currently, the only way to do this is to change the A record to point to Tumblr. This causes problems for previous URIs on my site, though the recently launched Pages feature is somewhat helpful in this regard.

All things considered, I expect Tumblr to only get better and become more extensible with age. If it doesn’t, I’ll be backing up my Tumblr account periodically should I need to move to another platform.

Tumblr also makes the content model you see here really easy to pull off. For the record, I don’t plan on following the canned Tumblr model that closely, that is to say, a blend of photos, quotes, links, etc. I intend to keep the site heavy on links and articles, and light on media, aside from the occasional embedded video.

And commenting? I’m leaving that off for now. I may enable it later (via Discus) for articles such as this. We’ll see. (Although, in the words of Dan Cederholm, perhaps the lack of commenting can be considered a feature.)

In the meantime, you can always find me on Twitter or send email to bored{at}cameronmoll if you’d like to express an opinion.

Thank you, Myles

Myles Grant, with whom I’ve worked for a few years now and the powerhouse behind Authentic Jobs, helped make all of these changes happen. He rocks, and this is a public thank you. Myles did some time at Flickr and now is helping the Tiny Speck team bring Glitch to life.

Thanks for reading. Fingers crossed everything works out as well as I hope it does.

Update: As John states, credit for the intermingled content idea may deservedly belong to Kottke.