Wu Wei 2

Wu Wei, my free WordPress theme, is cur­rently the 5th most pop­u­lar theme on WordPress.com, with over 550,000 blogs using it at the moment (not includ­ing ones being self-hosted), and it’s become so suc­cess­ful that the admin­is­tra­tors have made it one of the default themes for new sign-ups. By far the most com­mon sup­port ques­tion I get is why the WordPress.com ver­sion isn’t avail­able for WordPress.org users (some have even offered to pay for an update), so I’m very pleased to announce the release of ver­sion 2 for self-hosted blogs.

The theme has been updated to take advan­tage of new fea­tures that came with WordPress 3.x, such as cus­tom header and cus­tom back­ground APIs, cus­tom menu man­age­ment, as well as var­i­ous under-the-hood fixes and improve­ments. Tags and com­ments have also been included on the front page, to bring bet­ter stan­dard­iza­tion across WordPress.com and WordPress.org versions.

People have asked me why I don’t charge for such a theme, see­ing as how I’ve poured a tremen­dous amount of time and energy into some­thing used by so many peo­ple. I can only say that Wu Wei has brought me much luck since its release, and thanks to it’s pop­u­lar­ity, I’ve met many great peo­ple1, received new design work, and even had a chance to visit Britain — things I don’t think would have been pos­si­ble if Wu Wei was a paid theme.

  1. There was even a case of an old ex-girlfriend find­ing me when she decided use Wu Wei before she dis­cov­ered who made it. []

Version 12

equivocality.com is now run­ning ver­sion 12, in what I sus­pect will be the final design iter­a­tion for this site1.

The gem cannot be polished without friction

I’ve been itch­ing for a new look for a while now, around the time I was in England, some­thing that was reflec­tive of the peace I’ve made with myself and the world.

Life no longer feels like a draft where I’m try­ing to fig­ure things out, so I’ve aban­doned the beloved graph paper back­ground which debuted in ver­sion 9. Most ele­ments and text have been toned down a bit2 to give things a slick, clean, and pol­ished look, very much inspired by Jin Yang’s blog. I’m still in love with the large single-column lay­out that lets me post big pic­tures and videos, and most of the design is still based around that.

I’ve never been a fan of ver­ti­cal rules — they always seem to claus­tro­pho­bi­cally trap con­tent more than any­thing else — but I found they brought much-needed def­i­n­i­tion to the wide col­umn, now that the graph paper is no longer there. Other ele­ments are strong enough on their own to define the under­ly­ing grid. I’ve also added some gravity-defying page cor­ners to bring a bit of depth to the layout.

Even though Version 12 has been based sig­nif­i­cantly on my Version 11 code and design, I decided to give it a major revi­sion num­ber because it’s a new theme at heart. They may look sim­i­lar, but they feel very different.

Read the rest of this entry »

  1. For a very long time at least []
  2. I’ve real­ized that you don’t need retina-burning con­trast to give some­thing strong def­i­n­i­tion. []

Version 11

Version 11 has been retired here.

equivocality.com is now run­ning ver­sion 11. For a per­son who was noto­ri­ous for the fre­quency of his design changes, ver­sion 10 stuck around for a very long time — mea­sured in years, not months.

To everything, there is a season

I’m going through a sig­nif­i­cant shift in atti­tude right now. For the first time in so long, I feel sta­ble and com­plete, and I wanted my site to reflect this change. I’ve also been let­ting go of many things, and this cer­tainly gave me the moti­va­tion to update even though I adored the pre­vi­ous version.

I found lots of inspi­ra­tion in Jin’s recent refresh, which has an extremely smooth and slick feel to it. The ironic thing is that he wanted it to be clean and pol­ished, and told me he looked to ver­sion 10 of equivocality.com for ideas. Here I am get­ting ideas from his ideas from my ideas, in a won­der­ful cre­ative syn­ergy, and I think we’re both very happy with our mutual results.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Dawning: Rachel CD Release Concert

When Rachel Beausoleil started work­ing on her lat­est album, she approached me about design­ing the art­work. We sat down and threw around some ideas before she even started record­ing, but didn’t come up with any­thing solid because I didn’t have a sound to go on. All I knew was that it was a med­ley of songs, not like her last album where the songs fol­lowed a theme.

One day I came home to find a record­ing of the album in my mail­box, yet to be mas­tered. She named the album after the epony­mous track, The Dawning, which is a jazz arrange­ment of the famous song Aquarius, a per­sonal anthem of hers.

The Dawning artwork front

She gave me her notes soon after, so I put on the album and gave it a good lis­ten, feel­ing a cer­tain clar­ity from her sound. It made me think about dawn, and space, and sun­rises, and hot colours, so I incor­po­rated those ele­ments when lay­ing out the text, as well as some bokeh to give an off-focus glimmer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Surreptitiously Published

Japanese design book

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.

SimpleBits

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.

equivocality page

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.

Comment code

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. []

Versace Frames

Versace glasses

I wanted a bolder look this time, since my last pair is much more sub­tle. Actually, they’re still my cur­rent pair, as I wear one or the other, depend­ing on the mood.

Following the trend in most of my designs, I’m going for more con­trast and stronger statements.

They didn’t sit quite cor­rectly on my face (or most Asian faces, the sales rep told me, as we have nar­row nose bridges), because they don’t have nose pieces. The frames would be too low for my face and my eye­lashes would brush against the lenses, so I had to order some nose pads to add on myself, et voilà. A per­fect fit.

Versace logos

Of note is the logo on the arms. This is the first time that I’ve seen the Versace logo like this, but fur­ther research indi­cates that it’s an uncom­monly used alter­nate logo. I thought it was because the reg­u­lar logo would have lines that are too fine for small rep­re­sen­ta­tions, but that doesn’t appear to be the case, as I’ve seen it even smaller on watches and bracelets too. Which is just as well, as I wouldn’t care to wear any­thing with the Medusa’s head on it.

Version 10.3: The Lifestream

You may have noticed that I’ve adapted my pop­u­lar ver­sion 10 lay­out into a lifestream1. I quite enjoy the con­cept of the lifestream, where you can see a person’s lat­est activ­ity that’s up-to-date by the minute. A change like this means a bump up to a full sub-version num­ber, 10.3

The key to all of this is my new iPhone 3GS. The tech­nol­ogy has roughly caught up to my needs, so I decided to get one this year. Apple tends to announce new iPhone gen­er­a­tions every sum­mer, which means I’ve been plan­ning this design update for months now.

So with this fancy new iPhone I can write tweets on-the-go, stay up-to-date on the peo­ple I fol­low, and check my @replies, all with the Tweetie appli­ca­tion2. I once had my tweets inte­grated into the blog, but decided not to stick with this because the fre­quency with which I use twit­ter meant that the sheer num­ber of tweets was flood­ing my RSS feed. Then one day, the real­iza­tion dawned on me to exclude that one cat­e­gory from my feed, et voila! A sim­ple workaround that lets peo­ple sub­scribe to my twit­ter stream if they so choose.

I can also take pic­tures with the built-in iPhone cam­era and e-mail them to Flickr directly from the phone, which will auto­mat­i­cally cre­ate a WordPress post and embed the pic­ture in the entry3. And coin­ci­den­tally enough, the max­i­mum width for images posted to Flickr is 500 pix­els, which hap­pens to be exactly how wide the main col­umn of my blog is. It’s like it was meant to be.

So there are two new cat­e­gories: one for tweets, and one for snaps. Both of them dis­play with CSS styling unique to each cat­e­gory and an icon to denote the type of post. A note on the “snaps” icon; I tried to find some­thing that would rep­re­sent both a cam­era and an iPhone, because the iPhone isn’t a pure cam­era, nor is it just a phone. I decided to use the cam­era app icon built into the iPhone, which says both. There are no com­ments allowed on these entries because I don’t care for dis­cus­sion on such fleet­ing things. If some­one really wanted to com­ment, they could post a reply through twit­ter, or a com­ment through Flickr.

So unlike most other life streams, this blog is not exactly an aggre­ga­tor of var­i­ous ser­vice feeds because there’s a unique WordPress blog entry cre­ated for every one of my Flickr posts and tweets as well, each one retrieved from within the WordPress loop. I did this to retain a lit­tle inde­pen­dence from ser­vices like Flickr or twit­ter; if I ever chose not to use them any­more, my blog won’t explode into a ball of fire with all the miss­ing entries.

With all of this snazzy integration in place, I can post things quickly and on-the-fly, as long as I have internet access. Which is almost anywhere, now that I have a 3G data plan. Version 10.3 is a reflection of that.

With my ever increas­ingly busy life, the abil­ity to post snip­pets of things comes as a wel­come change to my reg­u­lar entries, which often take days to write.

  1. If you’re see­ing some strange ren­der­ing issues, they’ll prob­a­bly clear up if you refresh the page. []
  2. This also helps me avoid text mes­sag­ing charges, which is how I wrote tweets before, when I was out in the real world with no inter­net access, though my new data plan has unlim­ited texts any­way. []
  3. In an ideal world, I could send the pic­ture to a WordPress e-mail address or post it using the iPhone WordPress appli­ca­tion, but the post-by-email option of the for­mer doesn’t allow attach­ments, and the lat­ter has very crude image upload­ing options with only one set width avail­able for resiz­ing. []

Feed Reader

I’m a visual per­son. Personally, I’d rather peo­ple visit my site instead of adding my feed to an aggre­ga­tor. It’s a sad fact that the num­ber of sub­scribers to my feed nearly dou­bles my daily vis­i­tors. The look of my site is a reflec­tion of my cur­rent per­son­al­ity and mind­set, and even though it hasn’t changed in a while, it’s still rel­e­vant. I’ve held off using a feed reader for as a long as pos­si­ble, because I believe that a site’s look is as impor­tant as the infor­ma­tion that it conveys.

But my blogroll keeps grow­ing, and I’ve reluc­tantly turned to using an aggre­ga­tor to keep track of the sites I read on a daily basis. It’s a lot more effi­cient, but cold, and bor­ing, and I feel like I’m miss­ing out on some­thing the writer is try­ing to say.

Design Itch

Web design is a fre­quent itch for me, as inspi­ra­tion comes from every­where. Quite often, I come across a beau­ti­ful site that has a clever ele­ment here or an inter­est­ing pat­tern there, and get the urge to redesign my own.

But as there’s no such thing as a per­fect ath­lete, there’s no such thing as a per­fect design. Minimalism, while func­tional and acces­si­ble, tends to lack per­son­al­ity. Style — while beau­ti­ful and full of char­ac­ter — tends to be biased and stag­nant. I find myself in a con­stant state of flux between the two ideals.

Right now, I’d love to have a big­ger can­vas, some­thing like Days With my Father, where I can dis­play my pho­tos in a much larger for­mat (because, really, the impact of a pho­to­graph is lost when it’s small). I’d love to have items orga­nized by columns fit that per­fectly in a grid, aligned along nat­ural ver­ti­cal rules. I’d love to have some­thing a lit­tle more com­plex, some­thing that invites a viewer to explore further.

But I’m happy with this one. It does what I want. It looks right, no mat­ter what day or mood I’m in.

Having a design that matches my sit­u­a­tion is impor­tant to me, which means they gen­er­ally don’t last longer than a few months, as I tend to evolve within that time. There have been many times that I’ve writ­ten, “This is the last redesign for a while”, only to be unsat­is­fied in some way and to change it within a few months. I unveiled the cur­rent one at the begin­ning of the year, and it’s prob­a­bly the one I’ve been most sat­is­fied with. Whenever the itch strikes me, I browse through the archives and admire how clean every­thing is, and how dif­fer­ent types of con­tent seems to work in the same area. Then I real­ize how hard it would be to come up with some­thing bet­ter, and the itch goes away.

So no redesign for a while.

Promise.

Design Robbery

After my Perishable Press inter­view, and hav­ing Version 10 fea­tured in a Crestock arti­cle titled “13 Minimalist Designs You Really Should See”, this site has seen a surge in design-related traf­fic. But increased expo­sure is a double-edged sword. Higher pro­file sites make you a big­ger tar­get for secu­rity issues, spam, and design robbery.

Such as the case with eric-akmal.com.

Does this look familiar?

Eric Akmal Dot Com top

Eric Akmal Dot Com bottom

Read the rest of this entry »

Featured at Perishable Press

10.0 is cur­rently being fea­tured at Perishable Press, the first in a series of arti­cles explor­ing min­i­mal­ism in mod­ern web design. From the article:

Equivocality’s new min­i­mal­ist design is very impres­sive. The site appears clean, bright and refresh­ing and nav­i­gates with nat­ural sim­plic­ity. Jeff has elim­i­nated clut­ter to focus on con­tent, which is strongly uni­fied within the site’s sharp, spa­cious design. Attentive vis­i­tors will revel in the site’s exquis­itely restrained details, such as the sub­tle tex­ture pro­vided by the bleached back­ground grid, or the dynamic inter­play between com­ple­men­tary type­faces, Arial and Avenir. Overall, the design’s the­matic neu­tral­ity and uni­ver­sal approach inspire vis­i­tors to relax, focus, and enjoy.

In addi­tion to a detailed site review, Jeff Starr did a mini inter­view with me. I’ve come across Perishable Press sev­eral times through my WordPress wan­der­ings and it was great to work with some­one I’ve always known but never met.

10.0

Version 10 has been retired here.

Design break­down and inter­view about this ver­sion at Perishable Press, on the Minimalist Web Design Showcase.

Introducing the tenth ver­sion of equivocality.com.

Surgical Style

When approach­ing 10.0, I knew I wanted a note­book feel, so I used a grid back­ground to give the hint of paper. The idea was min­i­mal­ism. Single col­umn, no more icons, and super stripped-down meta data.

It’s still based on the good old 480 pixel-wide col­umn, although it’s bro­ken down into a grid with two main columns, which is used for the footer and other vary­ing pages. The dates on the left side are bul­lets that break out of the grid to help visu­ally sep­a­rate entries, and for a bit of style. Otherwise, it can be a lit­tle boring.

Read the rest of this entry »

Moleskine Cahiers

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.

Moleskine cahier

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.

A Trip to Zone Closer to Perfection

On a whim, I went to Zone after work. I’ve been in a dec­o­rat­ing mood lately. I spent about an hour in there, just gath­er­ing design ideas with what they had.

Thumbnail: Potpourri plate

Thumbnail: Potpourri plate closeup

I picked up a pin­cush­ion plate and some pot­pourri for my cof­fee table, replac­ing the glass bowl I had before, and lined it up with the edge of the chaise lounge.

Decorating my house has always been impor­tant to me, but I’ve never rushed into it. Part of the rea­son why it’s so empty right now is because I want to put up my own pic­tures, and I never had enough with which I was sat­is­fied to fill the walls. I don’t want pho­tos of mem­o­ries — what I have at work — I want pic­tures that set a cer­tain mood. Another thing that makes it hard is that I’ve never liked non-functioning dec­o­ra­tions; can­dles you’d never burn, baubles that don’t do any­thing, knick-knacks that clut­ter shelves don’t make sense to me.

Part of me wants to go out and buy every­thing at once and be set­tled, but another part of me never wants to finish.

Otherwise, I’d lose the thrill of the hunt, and the plea­sure of adding another thing that’s just right to the right place.

8.0

equiv­o­cal­ity 8.0 has arrived. Though arriv­ing with lit­tle fan­fare, I felt this design update was impor­tant enough to have it’s own entry.

8.0 is an evo­lu­tion in the design of this blog. I wanted a lay­out where the infor­ma­tion was pre­sented with less clut­ter, while main­tain­ing the min­i­mal­ist feel. There’s a rea­son behind every mar­gin, every line, every shade.

Read the rest of this entry »