colophon

Another day, another redesign. What follows is a little explanation of the why, the where, and the how. If you're looking for the who, you can check out my bio, or maybe even my portfolio (pending).

Assignation

I've always been intrigued by the origins of my last name, and my family history in general. A few years back, I went on a dream trip to the UK: backpacking through England, Scotland and Wales for three weeks. Partially it was a well-deserved holiday, and partially it was a long-overdue trip to acquaint myself with the home of my ancestors in the hopes of finding some relatives who had never moved across the pond. I was hoping for at least some tombstones and certificates and data I could add to my ever-burgeoning family history file. Contact with absolute strangers has given me valuable information, like the fact that my 3rd Great Grandfather, Joseph WASPE (1822-1900) was Head Porter at Clifton College in Bristol, England. If you happen to be lucky enough to get access to the grounds of this private institution, I've heard that you can see a small 'wasp' in the embellishments above the lintel of the porters lodge, designed just for him, as sort of an inside joke. Needless to say, I've periodically thought about little iconographic insects, especially considering the play-on-words with my surname. "...if bees are few" is actually a line from an Emily Dickinson poem, which I discovered accidentally, when I was thinking of buzzings and murmurings and the efforts of tiny wings.

Design

Whenever I am stressed out and have way too many things on my proverbial plate, I seem to play in Photoshop. The aforementioned buzzings and murmurings and the efforts of tiny wings were in the back of my mind when I happened to find the little bee, the letter "q" of the typeface Poetica Supp Ornaments, when I was helping a friend choose a typeface for her wedding invitations, and something clicked. The asterisk is a leftover from a previous design, and I have a feeling it'll be sticking around for some time. I find that I richochet back and forth between a lot of colour and a lack of colour. Because I wanted something light and happy as we head into summer, I tried not to make this design really heavy. But at the same time, I wanted something a little bit more grounded. The pink, to be honest, was getting on my nerves. I felt constrained by both the look and the title of the previous incarnation; I needed the freedom to be both playful and serious. I needed a little bit of whimsy and a little bit of all grown-up. These particular colors were inspired by an example in the Designer's Guide to Global Color Combinations. Oddly enough, due to the integration of ColorSync with the Safari browser, the background color of the background image doesn't match the hex color specified in the CSS, although it matches in every other browser. Aware of a work around for this? Contact me.

Typography

My name is Stacey Waspe and I am a type junkie. I prefer to spend hours looking at type and seeing what my name looks like in different faces, looking forward to another redesign. I may currently be using a mix of Mrs. Eaves and Tema Cantante Sans for the head. I'm currently using various versions of Lucida as my first choices for body copy on each platform, followed by Bitstream Vera Sans, Tahoma and Verdana. For the title of each post, I've chosen serif versions in the Lucida family as well as Georgia, a fairly standard serif, with Bitstream Vera Serif as a back-up. To determine the best faces, I did a little bit of reading, and referred to the Visibone Font Survey results a few times.

Technical

This site is built with CSS and XHTML, using Movable Type. Thanks to the fine efforts and loud cajoling of Angie McKaig, I finally gave up and used a generated CSS file, re-building my CSS file from the ground up. There are a few styles that are still missing that I'll be adding back in the coming days. The biggest difference this has made? The site now works in all browsers that I've tested. My advice to CSS newbies, if you're having a lot of cross-browser nightmares, rebuild your CSS from the ground up. It'll make your life easier in the long run. Oh, and now we're also using MT Blacklist, because of all those stupid comment spammers. Seems to be working fairly well, but if don't see your comment show up immediately, there'd be the reason. Sorry, but them's the breaks.