hyalineskies

Now, living in the heart of Palo Alto, I’ve finally reached that goal of living among nothing but beautiful things. It was that affluent, luxury-laden paradise that I had found so attractive in college, a place where everything from houses to sofas are labelled with the names of some of design’s greats. Palo Alto is the place where the ugliest cars are still rust-free and the oldest people are still looking relatively young. It is the playground of the Stanford collegiate and simultaneously that of the capitalist, a place where local coffee shops harbour graduate studies alongside multibillion-dollar deals. I had dreamed of such a thing. When I finally found myself a Palo Altan after moving away from San Francisco, I, too, had joined the ranks of a nameless aesthetic tribe.

Walking down the street in Palo Alto, one is bombarded by beauty: on University Avenue alone, I could furnish my apartment with Persian rugs, Barcelona chairs and new fixtures from Restoration Hardware before watching Some Like It Hot at the Stanford theatre. Chances are I’ve passed by over $1 million worth of luxury automobiles parked on the block, glistening in the California sunlight. The girl that passed me by was actually not 19 but rather cosmetically-enhanced at 39. Everyone has an iPhone. The bars are packed with wealthy twenty-somethings in styled clothes shrouding shaped bodies. Palo Alto is something out of an episode of Desperate Housewives, and my fourth-floor studio feels a few blocks over from Wisteria Lane. I think I saw Eva Longoria drive by in a Maserati.

As a lover of all things beautiful, I found myself falling into the superficiality head first, sucked into the charybdis that exists under the Caltrain station past Alma Street. I was design’s Dracula, and Palo Alto was quenching my thirst for anything at all æsthetic. I sipped my artisan mocha at Coupa Café and read Valleywag. I attended parties at venture capitalists’ houses in Atherton. I traded my old weapons — the Moleskine and Lamy Safari — for new, sleek Japanese writing gear. I nearly purchased a BMW, thinking that the Japanese cars just didn’t have enough prestige. I put a Louis Vuitton wallet in my back pocket. With affluence comes choice, and even though I make tens of thousands less than the median income in Palo Alto, I’m still a far cry richer than the $400-a-month student I was just four months ago. For a while, it was pretty cool, if not more than certainly pretty.

The last exam I took in April was Economics 496, a class on the history of economic thought. A perpetual cynic of Silicon Valley exuberance, I found myself interested in Thorstein Veblen, the sociologist/economist that wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. It was Veblen’s Leisure Class that introduced the world to a critique of the status-seeking, style-obsessed upper-middle class of the 1920s he called “conspicuous consumers”. While Veblen’s definition of conspicuous consumption was more strict than it is used in today’s economic vernacular (Veblen used the term to refer to goods bought for the primary purpose of aspiring to a higher social status,) I couldn’t help but feeling a little guilty. When I drove my new Acura to the airport last week, a suitcase of new clothes in the trunk, listening to something trendy on XM, I think Veblen’s ghost smashed through my windshield on the 101. Veblen would have hated me.

When I finally ended up back in Ann Arbor for a friend’s wedding that evening, I returned to my old cheap-food haunts carrying my fountain pen and Moleskine. When I sat down to read Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style, analysing consumer culture and why it drives the American economy, I had finally come to the conclusion that somewhere between February and now, I had lost all direction. I had lost my true love of design, instead diluting that love into something that was a mere love of style; my Modernist roots had become little more than another asset in a stylistic toolbox. The commoditised world of ubiquitous æsthetics had gone from my source of inspiration and subject of constant examination to something that had swallowed me whole. I had broken the cardinal rule of anthropology. I had become one of my own subjects. Now, after being vomited back out of the whale, it’s time to get back to business. This time, certainly more than the last, I’m in need of forgiveness.

hyalineskies returns

Somewhere inside, I found my way back to modernism, and I revolted against Nightingale, the last version of hyalineskies. After taking a rather different artistic direction, I immediately set out to redesign all of hyalineskies from scratch. I needed something true to design, not an ephemeral style, and it was impossible to extract that from Nightingale’s bloated codebase and various JavaScript effects. Sticking with the classic laws of æsthetics, I rebuilt hyalineskies into something modern and minimalist. In keeping with the minimalism, even this theme’s name is minimal; it is simply Nine.

I’m somewhat convinced that the IA of single posts was perfected in ærial, version seven of hyalineskies. You’ll notice that the overall organisation of this page is similar, trading some of the content surfacing in ærial’s sidebar for an article abstract and (if available) metadata such as sources for footnotes or links to downloads.

On the contrary, I’ve never been happy with the way that WordPress has handled archives. Archives are not dead content; rather, they are constantly explored by those coming from search queries, and WordPress has never had any good built-in functionality to surface this content or make it remotely explorable. As a beginning to a solution to this problem, all archive pages in Nine share a common interface known as the Archive Explorer. With the Archive Explorer, one can search, browse by category, or browse by date. (The date exploration function is by far the most awesome, creating a relative frequency graph by month.) While the Archive Explorer is still primitive and will certainly see iteration, it does a better job of doing what archive pages should do, allowing you to really browse the ever-growing repository of past hyalineskies content.

On the visual side, Nine also maintains strict adherence to the classics. Nearly every proportion of the columnar layout grid is based upon factors of 1.618 to 1, an approximation of the classical golden ratio. To maintain strict compliance with the ratio, the grid is built entirely in pixel units, with ems used only when text sizes may need to fluctuate for accessibility purposes. I also kept type simple, sticking with the classic Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk for headlines and Helvetica for body copy. The site uses only one colour, a hexadecimal approximation of Pantone 381 C.

The backend has also been relatively optimised; as my coding skills improve thanks to the demands of Facebook, my own pages have become more efficient. Nine uses less MySQL queries than Gridlock, ærial, or Nightingale, with all static content cached using WP-Cache. All of Nine’s assets weigh in at less than 1.2 MB, including development libraries such as Mootools and Fuselage, with an average theme page weight of around 30K after caching common CSS and JS assets.

The fun category names have also been replaced by three parent categories, Social Research, Design and Tutorials, the core hyalineskies content. Gratuitous JavaScript effects have generally been cut, and other en vogue Web 2.0 styles have also been stripped for the most part. Beauty doesn’t require gloss text and wet-floor techniques; rather, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was right nearly 40 years ago: “God is in the details.”

Updated WordPress section

After much demand, I’ve updated the popular Gridlock to version 1.5, adding some new functionality such as centred pages and Wordpress widget support. Nightingale and ærial are soon to follow, with the (ironically) simpler Nightingale probably being released around December 2007. Nine, of course, will eventually be released as well.

A while ago I wrote about Fuselage, a WordPress framework, that I followed up on in my last article. The original framework eventually grew to something so high-level with so much feature creep that the libraries became bloated. I’m using the slimmer parts of Fuselage on the backend of Nine; I’ll be releasing what I have of Fuselage soon, with Nightingale as its example theme, for use by developers needing more rapid development time and various design patterns for grids, typography and common WordPress hacks such as relative times.

Weekly scheduled content

Hopefully, I’ll be back to weekly content posts. I’m running hyalineskies on a two-week scheduled backup, with posts to pad against the off-chance that I won’t be able to write (or if I end up running out of creativity.) I used to follow this model roughly a year ago to much success; hopefully I’ll be able to stick with it this time. As a hint to next week’s content, I’ll be talking about the balance of utility in design, inspired by some of the designers at FontFont. I’ve also drafts on the social impact of Halo 3 in teenage circles, the impact of George Soros on the design of viral growth models, and the commoditisation of design, which all may or may not be eventually published.

Back to the publication

I’ve removed much of the little bits of hyalineskies content, with little idea of what I’ll add back. Most likely, I’ll re-add my del.icio.us linkblog, but my Flickr photostream, rarely relevant to hyalineskies, will probably not return.

I hope the few remaining hyalineskies loyalists will love the rebirth; if you do, tell your friends. After realigning myself and mitigating risk of content publication failure, I’m back. Seriously. I’ve learned an important sociological lesson, and I doubt I’ll ever fall into the same trap again.