It started with this tweet by Jay Hori. I was all like, “What? What blog design book?”.

Jay told me the name, so I found a copy of “クリエーターのための3行レシピ ブログデザイン” through HMV Japan, and they shipped it to me.

I flipped through the book and noticed that some of my web design idols were in there, like Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits and Shaun Inman¹. I won­der if Dan or Shaun know they’re in this book. That’s right, I’m on a first name basis with them. We hang.

When I got to recipe 57 (they label all their design tricks as “recipes”), I saw a pic­ture of my web­site. My expe­ri­ences with ther­apy were on the front page, along with me say­ing “Sometimes I come out feel­ing like a mon­ster, like some hor­ri­ble, fucked-up per­son.” I guess they don’t use English copy edi­tors, and my curse-filled words may give English speak­ing Japanese peo­ple the impres­sion that Canadians are psy­cho­log­i­cal monsters.

But aside from my own words, I real­ized it was the only thing I could under­stand. I had to ask some­one who could read Japanese. Someone who just came back from stud­ies there, and wasn’t allow to speak or write English for a month. Maggie. She sent me this:

Your site is being used to explain “Navigation through sim­plis­tic icons”. Or like, sim­ple, low-key, uncom­pli­cated. The right side intro­duces WordPress and Moveable Type and talks about their uses of tem­plates and tem­plate cus­tomiza­tion, then intro­duces your site as doing some­thing (can’t under­stand the word) with the back­ground in con­trast to how you use simple/clean icons as your navigation.

On the left page, under the screen­shot of your site it says “Displaying nav­i­ga­tion through min­i­mum design. Designated using CSS, the min­i­mum use of files is excel­lent.” Bad trans­la­tion. The way you use your files (I’m guess­ing this refers to the actual num­ber of pages and stuff on your site) is also quite min­i­mum and that is nice.

Cool.

And with the code for my com­ment bub­ble right in front of me, I had to won­der about the legal impli­ca­tions. It prob­a­bly wasn’t legal for them to pub­lish my source code, which is why they didn’t con­tact any of the own­ers of the web­sites to tell them that they were pub­lished. I hear the copy­right laws are noto­ri­ously lax in Japan.

1. Regarding his use of the old flash header that was a wave, inspired by anime. Shaun and I were also fea­tured in the Perishable Press min­i­mal­ism in web design series. [↑]

I’ve offi­cially retired my old note­book, the one I’ve been using since 1999. Starting in my first year of uni­ver­sity, it went every­where with me. Long trips, short trips, camp­ing, in the bath, you name it. I even included it on my list of what I was bring­ing to Hong Kong. It’s filled with so much ran­dom­ness: doo­dles, code, thoughts, quotes, lyrics, bad poetry (my own, of course), lists, ideas. One day, I’ll scan them in and doc­u­ment them.

But alas, it’s full.

As a replace­ment, I bought a set of three Moleskine Cahiers. They’re thin­ner and lighter, which is exactly what I’m look­ing for; it took me over eight years to fill my last one, and I didn’t need some­thing that would last that long.

I do have sev­eral pocket size Moleskine note­books scat­tered around the house and in var­i­ous bags for use in sit­u­a­tions such as rid­ing the bus, but those are rather dif­fi­cult to write in unless sit­ting at a desk due to their small size.

These cahiers are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. From the insert:

THE MOLESKINE CAHIERS are jour­nals with heavy-duty card­board cover, in black and buff with vis­i­ble stitch­ing on the spine. The last 16 sheets are detach­able and there is a wide pocket for loose notes.

The pages have a delight­fully smooth feel to them, and absorb ink with­out bleed­ing. I’ll be keep­ing one in my back­pack, one in my shoul­der bag, and one in my cam­era bag. I need them now more than ever.

There’s so much to write and so lit­tle time.