Cameron Moll / Designer, Speaker, Author

Regret.

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:48:07 -0400

Kathryn Schulz, as quoted by Maria Popova:

If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn’t to live without any regrets, the point is to not hate ourselves for having them… We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly — it reminds us that we know we can do better.”

FF Chartwell, a Chart Font

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:55:00 -0400

Earlier today Erik Spiekermann made mention of FF Chartwell, and, at least conceptually, it’s pretty fantastic.

Similar to the way icon fonts replace keyboard characters with icons, FF Chartwell uses alphanumeric characters to generate beautiful charts on the fly. To my knowledge, however, this works only in software programs and can’t be embedded in web pages.

Update: ~~It can be embedded~~. It’s possible to embed it, but the current EULA doesn’t allow it. Demo by Yaron Schoen who says, “Besides the FOUT which was really hard (impossible?) to remove, it was glorious.”

The family includes “weights” for creating bar, line, radar, pie, rose, and ring charts. A simple math equation, such as 10+20+30, is all that’s needed to generate the chart. Each value can be assigned a color, which in turn becomes the value’s color in the chart.

In something such as Photoshop, it’s quite cumbersome to change the values, as you have to enable and disable the OpenType feature to do so. In other programs such as InDesign, this isn’t as cumbersome (as shown in the video above).

Here’s a simple example using Chartwell Rings and Chartwell Lines. The same equation is utilized in both charts:

Conceptually, I love the idea and hope to see this and other fonts expand to include webfont embedding, assuming the data could be represented semantically and accessibly. You can purchase FF Chartwell as a whole or as separate charts, and you can find additional usage examples on the FontFont blog.

Homeschool Quizzing for Four Grade Levels

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:58:50 -0400

TL;DR: It’s challenging.

Some of you know we homeschool our four children. Their U.S. grade levels range from 1st to 6th grade. Suzanne teaches them Monday through Thursday, and I put in a half-day on Friday to school them in the morning.

Because Suzanne covers several of the foundational topics such as math, science, and history, I complement their studies with less fundamental things like Spanish, sports, music, and computers (most notably HTML & CSS). One might argue these latter subjects are equally foundational, but that’s another topic for another day.

It’s quite challenging, as you might expect, to gather, produce, and teach curriculum to four different grade levels simultaneously. I won’t delve into how we do it, as that’s also another topic for another day.

Instead, I’ll simply share our latest quiz (PDF) from last Friday, encompassing the four subjects I’m currently teaching:

Created somewhat hastily in Pages (questions) and Illustrator (rhythm exercises), they certainly aren’t anything to brag about in terms of production quality. And this is only one of four quizzes. Each child gets a different version of the quiz according to their grade level and educational maturity.

What’s notable, I think, is that this latest quiz was our most comprehensive yet. It covers quite a bit of material, in part because the last quiz I issued was back in January 2012. A crazy work schedule in recent weeks hasn’t allowed me to stay on top of schooling as much as I’d like. Which, you guessed it, is another topic for another day — that of adequately educating our children while balancing the rest of life’s demands.

All of this rambling and quiz tomfoolery leads to this pro tip and the real reason for this post: I’ve found it helpful to create the quiz for the most senior grade level first, and then pair down a) the volume of questions and b) the difficulty of the questions. This makes the insurmountable task of creating quizzes for four grade levels a little less impossible.

Note that I’ve said nothing about quizzing itself and the debate among homeschoolers about testing your children. Regardless of those debates, I find quizzes to be helpful to evaluate how I’m doing as a teacher and to gauge how they’re internalizing what I teach.

Hopefully, something I’ve said here is helpful for those of you currently homeschooling or those of you considering it. If you haven’t already, you’ll discover homeschooling is precisely the same as parenting: Read as many books and blogs as you’d like, but at the end of the day, it’s all about trial and error. Lest you think I have this quizzing thing figured out (and homeschooling in general), I’ve made plenty of errors and continue to error.

Maybe I’ll share that story another day, too.

Don’t Expect Applause

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:47:12 -0400

Don’t Expect Applause:

Seth Godin:

If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work—the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.

Who decides if your work is good? When you are at your best, you do. If the work doesn’t deliver on its purpose, if the pot you made leaks or the hammer your forged breaks, then you should learn to make a better one. But we don’t blame the nail for breaking the hammer or the water for leaking from the pot. They are part of the system, just as the market embracing your product is part of marketing.

Newcastle

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:38:00 -0400

Newcastle:

An impromptu compilation using footage I gathered during my stay in Newcastle Upon Tyne and Gateshead (UK).

This was my first visit to Newcastle, in town to speak at DIBI 2012. I flew in Sunday evening, dropped off my luggage, grabbed my camera, and proceeded to lose myself in the streets of the city. The camera captured what I saw. I later debuted this video during my presentation.

I didn’t have a tripod with me as I was traveling light. I won’t make a blunder like that again. (Some shots stabilized in post.)

Skipping vs. Internalizing

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:55:00 -0400

Skipping vs. Internalizing:

Stephen Anderson, commenting on concerns within the community regarding “skipping the critical IA step” or “ditching wireframes to go straight to hi-fidelity”:

Human beings don’t think about content separate from presentation separate from structure separate from (fill in the blank)… We experience the world around us as one integrated whole. By insisting that we create these artificial distinctions [with clients and our projects], we confuse more than help.

Asking someone to comment just on the interaction or just on the structure — independent of the other pieces — is a bit like asking someone to judge a chocolate chip cookie based on only a handful of ingredients. ‘Here, these are the wet ingredients (eggs, sugars, vanilla) — what do you think of this cookie?’

How can we possibly expect to get good feedback on such an incomplete experience?

/via @jmspool

“Creativity is a Verb”

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:12:00 -0400

“Creativity is a Verb”:

Milton Glaser, as quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine:

There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creative people can just show up and make stuff up. As if it were that easy.

I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb, and very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.”

‘Paper’ for iPad

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:36:00 -0400

‘Paper’ for iPad:

There are so many things right about this app. The lovely watercolor, miniature sketchbook icon. The marketing site. The “take this everywhere life takes you” video above. And the undo gesture: Place two fingers on the screen and draw a circle counter-clockwise to undo and clockwise to redo. (Though the number of undo/redo steps are limited.)

Download the app for free, and then purchase additional brushes for $1.99 or the entire set for $7.99. But I bet you’ll be really impressed with the calligraphy brush, which comes with the free app. Handwriting and sketching have never looked so good on iPad.

/via @gt

Ideas of March

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:11:57 -0400

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
–W. Somerset Maugham

Pressing ‘Pause’ on this site for a while has afforded me time and distance to realign my writing objectives. An invitation from Chris Shiflett to join today’s “Ideas of March” has afforded me an opportunity to break the silence.

Successful blogging, much like Maugham’s quote about novel writing, is largely a mystery. While there are certainly foundational principles that can increase our chances of success, we’ve all seen articles and posts that break all the rules and go on to receive extraordinary traffic, comments, and retweets.

But if our definition of successful blogging — nay, let’s say successful writing — is measured in terms of audience reach and grammatical proficiency, we’re measuring the wrong things. Letters of Note, for example, repeatedly proves good writing does not necessarily equal grammatical proficiency. Additionally, I’ve read plenty of beautifully written pieces that may have been seen by only a handful of eyes beyond my own. (Many of these have been written by my wife and sons.)

Writing, at its core, is a means of personal expression. The greatest measure of its success lies in what it returns to the author. Consider this: I’ve handwritten — yes, with ink — many pages in my personal journal that have been read only by myself. But I consider this some of my most successful, and meaningful, writing because it comes from the heart, allows me to ponder what I’m doing with my life, and encourages me to be a better person.

For those of us who are creative professionals, there are few exercises more beneficial to our profession than writing; persistent writing, to be specific, as the act of writing does more for our ability to think creatively than just about anything else. It forces us to synthesize our thoughts and opinions on paper, which in turn yield an opportunity for critique by ourselves and by others. Synthesizing, as I’ll share in my presentations at DIBI and Interlink in the coming months, is simply the act of organizing unorganized matter — a fancy way of saying create.

And that’s the hope for Ideas of March: a rededication to creative, persistent, meaningful writing, specifically in the form of blogging. If you’d like to participate in Ideas of March, please see Chris Shiflett’s post.

Gridiron League

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:26:04 -0500

Gridiron League:

Wes Kull:

This is not an exercise in nostalgia but an interpretation of the league’s founding principles through the symbols that we, as football fans, identify with most.

Many NFL franchises — Patriots, Broncos, Rams, Lions — have updated their uniforms and logos to a swooshed-out, dropped-shadowed, and more commercial-ready image, ignoring a good deal of their team’s heritage and the original rough-and-tumble character that the league stood for.

Of Mice and Markets

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:53:39 -0500

Of Mice and Markets:

Zeldman:

In the short run it’s going to be hell, just as the browser wars and their lack of support for common standards were hell. But it is the short run….

When I see fragmentation, I remind myself that it is unsustainable by its very nature, and that standards always emerge, whether through community action, market struggle, or some combination of the two. This is a frustrating time to be a web designer, but it’s also the most exciting time in ten years. We are on the edge of something very new. Some of us will get there via all new thinking, and others through a combination of new and classic approaches.

Well written, well said.

Lighting Techniques for Video Interviews

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:34:51 -0500

Lighting Techniques for Video Interviews:

This is an excellent tutorial that answered a lot of questions for me regarding how to light an interview properly, as that’s something I’m still experimenting with.

Hero

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:21:00 -0500

Hero:

This is a really fantastic, well-shot piece. And the resulting portrait definitely wasn’t what I was anticipating.

Update: The process of creating art with small dots is called stippling. Had no idea. (Thanks @signalnoise.)

/via @jontangerine

Letterpress Tuesday

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:49:02 -0500

Letterpress Tuesday:

A brief hiatus from hiatus-ing to announce Letterpress Tuesday, a one-day holiday sale exclusively for letterpress goods made by yours truly and a few other vendors.

As for my stuff, this is final promotional sale of 2011, so if you’d hoping to receive or gift one of my posters at a discount this Christmas, today is the day to pick one up.

Happy holidays, all.

Hiatus

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:10:27 -0400

It’s clear by now dust is gathering at this domain. I’ve been okay with that, and will continue to be okay with it, but only a little longer. I’ve been swamped with obligations on my current projects and have traveled much more than usual. I’ll visit NYC for the third time in a month starting next week, for example.

More importantly, I’ve realized I need to realign the focus of this site. The tumblog, light-narrative format is definitely enjoyable, and it’s helped me blog more frequently, as well. But I’ve realized it’s not entirely what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Without doubt, linking to and editorializing others’ articles takes just as much skill as writing one’s own. However, I find it doesn’t challenge me creatively as much as authoring my own stuff. I progress most efficiently as a designer and thought leader when composing and criticizing my thoughts rather than others’.

To this end, I plan to author more original content soon, but it’ll take a while to figure out the right approach for that. Hang tight, and follow me on Twitter, Google+, Dribbble, and Instagram in the meantime.

Build Icon Set, vol. I

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:02:00 -0400

Build Icon Set, vol. I:

This is just neat. Adrian Pelletier, recently married and not in a position to donate as much as he’d like to our charity: water campaign, contacted me to offer his Build icon set as a free download for those who donate. It’s what we call an in-kind donation, and it’s very kind of him.

So, first donate to charity: water if you haven’t already, and then download the icons.

Twelve Days

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:39:00 -0400

I’m blessed to have remarkable parents who created opportunities for unforgettable experiences during my childhood. This is one of those experiences.

Leading up to Christmas one year, my parents gathered the family together and announced that we would be helping another family in need. This wasn’t foreign to us, as we had not only done the same before, but we had also been the recipients of similar giving during lean Christmases as a family.

The plan was simple: For 12 days leading up to Christmas, we would deliver a package with food, toys, and essential supplies. On the 12th day before Christmas, the package contained 12 items. On the 11th day, 11 items. And so on.

However, the package was to be delivered at night anonymously without the recipient family knowing who made the delivery. And there the fun began. Each night one of us was assigned to sneak up to the front door, place the package on the doorstep, pose in a runner’s stance with one finger on the bell, and then run like crazy after ringing it. The getaway car, cleverly disguised as a minivan, was just around the corner.

On Christmas Eve, I was entrusted with delivering the final package. We safely assumed the family was on to us by now, expecting a delivery sometime that evening. No tomfoolery this time, no sir. Thus, I was extra cautious as I approached the doorstep. Quiet as a mouse.

But to no avail. They knew we were coming. For there on the doorstep stood, not a person, but a card. It was placed atop a plate of homemade cookies. Essentially the card said this:

To our Secret Santa: Thank you. We can’t express enough gratitude for making Christmas wonderful for our family this year.

Years later, when the impact of that one night finally registered in my mind — and more importantly, my heart — I realized that we weren’t delivering packages that Christmas. We were changing lives. Real people with real needs and genuine gratitude for our family. (I have a hard time even typing these words, much less sharing the experience vocally, without getting a little emotional.)

I share this story as I request your help one final time to contribute to the Authentic Jobs charity: water campaign. Almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. Real people with real needs, and I’m confident they possess genuine gratitude for those of us who can help.

Many of you have already made very generous donations: Myles Grant, Stefan Hartwig, Ryan Essmaker, Stefan Velthuys, Nate Tharp, Elliot Jay Stocks, Jeffrey Snider, Christine Rondeau, Mark Wyner, Sarah Fraser (on behalf of Jenna Dixon), Grant Hutchinson, Jason Ferrell, Veerle Pieters, Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain, Neutron Creations, and many more of you too numerous to mention here.

Our campaign concludes Monday, October 3. We’ve got a long ways to go to reach our goal. Give $3, the cost of a plate of cookies, if that’s all you have to spare. Or the $20 you would have spent on a shirt. Or $100 or more if your finances are healthy. Please, donate now.

HTML5 Whiteboard Magnets

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:38:17 -0400

Last Friday I posted a photo of these magnetic HTML5 elements from part of our homeschool curriculum, and several of you expressed interest in knowing how I made them.

It’s pretty simple: magnetic sheets that are compatible with any inkjet printer. I’ve used Avery magnet sheets satisfactorily for similar projects. For this project, however, I used Office Depot magnet sheets. They have a glossy finish, whereas the Avery ones have a matte finish. Comparing the two, the ink seems to be more durable with the glossy finish.

We’re lucky enough to have a really big whiteboard (like 8’ x 4’ big) in our school room, which provides plenty of space for hands-on HTML5 instruction, in addition to writing actual markup. I’m sure the magnets would work just fine on a smaller whiteboard or printed at smaller sizes.

If you’d like to download my .ai files, have at it. Add your own elements as needed. After all, wouldn’t the web would be a much better place if we all taught our children the fundamentals of good markup?

Download html5-magnets.ai

Food Allergy Walk for Jonas Gruber

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:34:02 -0400

Food Allergy Walk for Jonas Gruber:

John Gruber and I have known each other for years, first teaming up on a project for Joyent way back when, and communicating regularly since then.

We share something in common: a son who has a serious medical condition. Jonas has a life-threatening dairy allergy, as described by his mother:

Jonas had a food challenge, where an allergic child is given measured doses of his allergen in a hospital setting. Jonas started the challenge with an eighth of a teaspoon of milk, administered by a nurse. Within five minutes of the dose, he said, ‘I feel weird, Mama’. And then things got crazy…. I only remember screaming and hearing things like ‘seizure! and ‘I.V. push!’ and then Jonas slowly regained consciousness.

John has been a big supporter of my efforts over the years, both personally and in business. In a small but hopefully significant way, I’ve returned the favor by contributing to his son’s campaign. I hope you can pitch in, too.

You’ve Already Seen This

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:16:00 -0400

You’ve Already Seen This:

Unless your entire social circle was under a rock yesterday, you’ve already seen Facebook Timeline. But what’s most interesting to me is seeing the influence of two notable designers, Tom Watson and Nicholas Felton, craft and shape this refined concept.

Many designers likely had a hand in this, I recognize that. But consider Tom Watson’s Level & Tap, a site with a focus on impressive — and impressively large — images. Then consider Nicholas Felton’s Feltron Annual Reports. Put the two together and it’s clear where the influence originated from.

And if there were any doubts about that influence, Tom’s tweet yesterday should clear things up:

It should be clear now why we hired @feltron. It’s been a blast designing it.

Side note: Dustin Curtis’ Lifepath.me app is for sale on eBay as a result of yesterday’s announcement.