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If you’re a design geek like me, you might be interested to know that the VideoPress logo (as well as all of VideoPress.com) is set in the beautiful Museo family of typefaces, designed by your fellow WordPress.com bloggers at the exljbris Font Foundry (exljbris.wordpress.com).

via Announcing VideoPress.com « Blog « WordPress.com.

Mainly, the redesign is content focused. After so many years as a web designer, and after creative directing so many influential projects, I naturally considered doing a wide, three-column, ultra-modern design—something cool, detached, polished, and glowing with rich media and fancy-pants sliding-drawer JavaScript effects. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things. In the right circumstances, those things can rock hard. But this site is mainly about my writing. So I crafted a simple look that encourages reading and hearkens back to this site’s early years.

And, it was my pleasure helping him turn his HTML gold into WordPress magic.

via Redesigned – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report.

Over at Automattic, we’ve been hard at work on P2, a, dare I say, revolutionary “theme” for WordPress. I’m very proud to have been involved with the development and design of it – I work with some amazing people and this has been an especially fascinating project.

I put “theme” in quotes, because P2 is not just a “theme.” It is a way of thinking. Specifically about “themes,” but also about what WordPress is – it’s obviously much more than a CMS or a blogging system. Calling P2 a “theme” just doesn’t do it justice.

As trial will show, it’s done a lot for Automattic alone. In just the past few months our modes of communication have drastically changed – more so than I would have expected – all because of P2. Also, our productivity and transparency (both internally and externally) have grown fantastically.

WordPress “themes” are finally moving away from set formulas to attacking problems and adpating to workflows… they are doing what design is supposed to do: solve problems. Themes are becoming applications. And, something tells me, we’re going to see some amazing things from the WordPress community in the near future. I’m excited.

Get P2 at WordPress.com or for your self-hosted blog.

via How P2 Changed Automattic — Matt Mullenweg.

Thomas Dolby runs an awesome blog that is WordPress powered.

He also cooks his tapes.

… Don’t worry this is what you do with old master tapes. The oxide likes to detach itself from the backing, and if you don’t bake it back on, big clumps fall off on the tape heads the moment you try to play it. This restoration process was only discovered a few years ago. Up until then I had pay a large annual rental fee to store my tapes in the basement at Abbey Rd, at what was thought to be the ideal temperature and moisture.

That basement has served over the years as a bomb shelter, butchers’ repository, and storage place for the Sgt Pepper’s 4-tracks and mellotron. Once EMI discovered that tapes stored down there were actually falling apart, and needed to be baked to be playable, they offered a ‘restoration service’ to artists and producers, charged at a high hourly rate. So they got a bit more cash out of me for that. But when I found out that the recipe was quite simple and could be easily done in a domestic oven, I switched to doing it myself. …

via Thomas Dolby’s Blog » Blog Archive » Urban Tribal found

Once upon a time, I created web pages with some WYSIWYG editor created by Corel. It was horrible, but it allowed me to make my site look however I wanted it to. And, at the time, that meant really ugly. But I was happy as a clam, running home from school (yeah, this was a *long* time ago) I couldn’t wait to play art director.

So, along comes the CMS revolution. It automated content, but made it harder for people to customize their sites. The art director in all of us died a little. That may have been a good thing… *cough* MySpace *cough* But in all honesty, control is what people crave and need, automation was what they thought they needed ;)

Empowering users with the ability to play art director and control as much as they can, from within a theme, is the future. And without doubt, Jason Santa Maria was one of the first people to really pull this off and make us all think a little bit harder. Oh yeah, I made a plugin to help out with this too!

Inline with that thinking, we need to empower users with the ability to not only control *how* the site looks, but *what* it does. We need to think about themes as more than the paint on the walls, but as the structure of the building. WordPress is about more than words. Photoblogs, videoblogs, tumblelogs, stores, applications – we need more diversity in not just the look, but the type of themes in the WordPress world. I’m not sure “theme” or “template” even covers what it is a “theme” does.

The future is looking at the past and understanding what made the web so interesting in the beginning, and then figuring out how we can help WordPress users do just that.

“Art Direction,” is a WordPress plugin I wrote to create per-post styles for increased control over the art-direction of your WP powered site. I’ve released version 0.2.1 which is a huge improvement over prior versions. Versions prior to 0.2.1 produced invalid code in some instances, due to the style tag not being valid when placed anywhere except inside the head. As of 0.2.1 all code output is placed in the head of your template. Rockin’ huh? :)

Version 0.2 of the Art Direction Plugin is now available.

Update: Version 0.2 is now available. This fixes a small bug that may result in duplicate styles.

Short story:

I wrote a plugin (it’s in beta) available over here: WordPress › Art Direction. The tagline is “Per-post styles for new age art direction.”

Long story:

Automation is the king of convenience. It’s also a killer of creativity and quality. Examples: MP3 vs. Vinyl, Transistors/Diodes vs. Tubes, Xerox vs. Letterpress, Digital vs. Film. The newer technologies allow a quicker route to (perceived) gratification, but the older technologies always deliver a superior end result.

Web sites have gone from home-grown concoctions of HTML thrown together with bits of glue and tape,  to vast content management systems automating the entire process. It’s lowered the barrier of entry for publishing on the Web, but it’s also sucked away the creativity.

I’ve been in love with blogging and feel that CMS’s are the way of the future. But, I’ve also been feeling an ever increasing homogenization on the web – in part because of the low barrier of entry for publishing, and the finite amount of designs available to most individuals – and the static nature of these designs.

Earlier this year two things happened on the web that opened my eyes. I designed a theme for WordPress.com, Monotone. It took colors from an image and used them to surround the image and create a somewhat dynamic and unique experience for each entry. A nice blend of dynamic and static qualities.

Elsewhere, a little after the launch of Monotone, Jason Santa Maria redesigned his site using EE – the horror! ;) – to give him more control over each entry’s design. It was a brilliant use of technology!

But, I don’t want to pay for my content management system when there is already a superior, Open Source, and extensible system available. (I’m talking about WordPress.)

So, I wrote a plugin to provide me with the ability to add styles/javascript/whatever I wanted to each entry, I call it Art Direction. It’s in beta right now. So, help me make it better, so we can all enjoy a little more flexibility and creativity.

Caveat: it may invalidate your code, depending on how you use the plugin (due to inline styles). This is a temporary problem.

100,000 downloads of WordPress 2.7 in 20 hours, and the pace is picking up.

via 100,000 in 20 by Ryan Boren

WordPress 2.7 has been released. It’s awesome. But, I’ll let the video do the talking:

Where did the past 12 days go?

I’m not quite sure, but I am glad that Ms. Moss was here to comfort you.

–

The last week I spent time with my possie, the Automattic crew. It was awesome getting to live, work, and play with them for a while. It kind of felt like the Real World, geek edition. I was hoping we’d have had some confessions of invalid code or unicode debauchery, to go along with the code filled week, but no luck.

My favorite part of the trip: getting schooled by Nikolay on UTF-16.

–

Without further awkwardness, a polaroid of Zooey Deschanel:

And just for kicks, John Lennon.

–

BTW, someone remind me to cleanup the design around here… ya know, when it gets bad enough.

I’m starting to use mycrocosm and found that their dev blog is hosted on WordPress!

Mycrocosm is a web site that makes it possible for people to use statistical graphs and other visual language tools for expressive social communication. In particular it provides an alternative to purely text based micro-blogging software. We encourage our users to creatively use the visual forms we have provided to express whatever they may want about themselves or the world they are living in. This can range from keeping track of daily activities (What are you doing? — but visually) to expressing opinions, making jokes or any other form of social interaction.

via About « Mycrocosm

As requested, here are the slides from my talk at WordCamp SF 2008.

(Download in PDF format.)

Here are links to some PHP color libraries:

• csscolor.php
• ColorChip

Once my color finding algorithm is perfected, I’ll be releasing it as an open source PHP class.

Thank you, everyone, for attentively listening to my talk, and for the great feedback.

Being an Automattician and all, I’ll be attending WordCamp this Saturday the 16th.

As lorelle mentions, there are also quite a bit of wonderful treats surrounding WordCamp, like a WordPress Genuis Bar and a WordPress Charity Scavenger Hunt!

I’m extra excited to go, since somehow, they missed it, and are allowing me to present! There are going to be some really amazing speakers, like: Jane Wells, Andy Skelton, Andy Peatling, Alan Levine, Tantek Çelik, Noel Jackson, Joseph Scott, Lloyd Budd, Mark Jaquith, Stephen O’Grady, Jeremy Clarke, Aaron Brazell, Sam Bauers, Will Norris, Liz Danzico, Chris Lea, Tom Coates, Chuck Lewis, Stephan Spencer, Steve Souders, and more!!!!

All in part to an offer I just couldn’t refuse, I’m now part of the Automattic team. I’m very excited and very honored to be working with such an awesome team. I’ll be working on top secret projects (and some not so top secret projects), pushing pixels, flipping bits, and bringing my insight to all that I can.

Most of you (that’s you Mom) know Automattic through their work on WordPress and Akismet.

Wordpress 2.6 was released last week. It’s definitely my favorite release thus far. There are a lot of reasons to be excited about it, but I won’t waste my breathe – the Automatticians already have in this awesome recap video:

But, the coolest feature, and the one I’m proud to have spent a lot of time and hard work on, is the Press This bookmarklet:

A theme we designed for Automattic was uncovered at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco:

Mullenweg’s “one last thing” was to show off was an upcoming theme called “chameleon” that will change the color scheme, and look and feel of your site based on what photos you post. Themes, which have become a veritable commodity with their own store have proven to be a huge success among Wordpress.org users. This marks the first time a company theme has taken such a high level of automatic customization–something that third-party theme-makers have been making money off with their own efforts.

[via Webware: WordPress founder talks traffic, new features to Web 2.0 crowd]

Wordpress 2.5 is out! It’s one of the most significant releases to date, in my opinion.

The nightly releases have made it significantly easier for me to blog. Thanks Automattic and everyone (which is a ton of people, including one line of code from myself) who contributed!

And, on top of being just plain awesome, one of my favorite design studios ever, Happy Cog, (who redesigned the admin section of the app) did a killer job with the interface design.

I just updated to the WP trunk. Which is just fantastic.

I need a new design to go along with the upgrade, so until then, I’m sticking with Kubrick.