jcksn

I wrote this a month or so ago, and never published it.

We live in amazing times. Just amazing.

The internet has blessed us all with the power to communicate with each other. It took a while, but we finally realized that the internet doesn’t have to be all about cats and animated gifs. Even though, those are still two very popular topics.

Not just geeks are on the net anymore, either. I just learned, Kanye West has a blog… and it’s probably actually HIM blogging on it! Not to mention he has a Vimeo account (”suck on that Flickr,” says Vimeo founder j/k)! BTW, Kottke, who I rubbed the wrong way many years back, alerted me to all this, on his unimaginably popular blog.

After watching this video, how can you not love the internet?

We’ve finally learned that there is more to life than “me” and that the “we” is what makes the world go round.

The internet does have a heart. It enables us to do some really amazing things.

Recently, along with Coudal Partners, 37Signals, Metafilter, Happy Cog, Iconfactory, Core77, Daring Fireball, Emma, Business Brickyard, and skinnyCorp, I got to help kids benefit from your filthy gambling habit. My design studio eight6 donated $1000 to buy some books for kids, by matching your donations.

I’ve always been unnaturally excited to help others. Being able to do that through my work, is gratifying. eight6 is heavily focused on helping the world and it will always be a core part of who I am and what my company represents. It sounds “deep,” and kind of corny. But it’s pretty simple. We build and design things (usually websites), using design to clarify communication and in return, help make good things happen.

In the next few months I’m going to be launching a program to help loving geeks help the world become a better place, just by doing what they do. Sounds interesting? I think it is. It will be an experiment, but an interesting and, hopefully, a fruitful one.

Classic typography is being used quite cunningly by, what appears to be, a Coudal designed, SEED Conference Website.

It pulls on old style typsetting. Using, to great affect on Readability, all forms of typographic style, for example, using italics for emphasis on space and topic in the first title sentence.

I attended the first SEED Conference and found it, surprisingly, to be one of the most important talks I’ve encountered. It’s a conference that is truly a gathering of wonderful minds.

Related, when searching Wikipedia for “Typography” I came across a “A specimen of roman typefaces by William Caslon”¹.

A specimen of roman typefaces by William Caslon