Damian’s notes

Long ago I discovered that when it comes to averaging or mixing colours in code, it works better when you use one of the colour spaces like CIELab that model colour perception rather than the RGB signal strengths used in colour production. Björn Ottosson is an indie developer whose OKLch and OKLab colour-space definitions have rapidly become standard in web browsers and editors. Here’s a blog post where he discusses creating colour-picker UIs using variations on the OKLab system.

I love letter-carving—that is, I love watching other people do it, I have not tried it myself. In this video from the V&A, sculptor Miriam Johnson is taking it old-school by carving Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Zed typeface superfamily (Peter Biľak et al.) is a variable font with four axes (width, weight, slant, and roundedness). Just van Rossum came up with an elegant interactive visualization of the mind-boggling design space.

Browsing the Tangible Media site and here’s something I didn’t know about: a microfilm blueprint embedded in a punched card encoding the metadata identifying the image. A highly tangible digital–analogue crossover format!

I am old enough to remember when different charsets for different locales was the norm and Unicode was a controversial and ambitious project to create one character set to represent all languages. UTF-8, the very clever encoding format for Unicode is ubiquitous now but is actually so new the original default for web pages was the relatively parochial ISO 8859-1. Here is a very clear 37-minute tutorial on why UTF-8 and what it is, with bonus coda on the cunning way Korean Hangul script is represented in Unicode.

Bricolage Grotesque is a free and open source variable font by Mathieu Triay with (it says here) French attitude and British mannerisms. It’s great for headlines and display text. And it has a fabulous brochure website.

The form of the ‘But doctor, I am Pagliacci!’ joke we delight in seeing remixed online is from the character Rorschach in Watchmen by Alan Moore—though the story goes back to the 19th century at least, often naming famous clowns like Grimaldi, Carlini, Grock. The name Pagliacci isn’t one of those, as it turns out, but the name of an Italian opera about clowns.

Anyway … here’s a version where life imitates art.

China’s massive rollout of wind and solar farms boggles the mind, and also creates a whole new type of landscape photography.

Fascinating aspect of online culture, is how poems and retellings 40 or 200 years old get swept up and remixed to make new jokes that are almost impossible to explain to someone who’s not seen the previous 15 iterations.