Here are all the details about the site and a little about what I do in the studio. Oh, plus some of the changes I’ve made.
Colophon explains how everything is made, where’s, why’s, and how’s.
This is the back rooms of the site. Some rando code or style rules may 'no-clip' into unknown walls, respect the box model. The tools, the stack, the influences, and a few recent changes. Even though the site itself is more than two decades old, it really does tend to evolve in spurts, but let’s see how things go!
Handmade, in the literal sense: hypertext markup language, cascading style sheets, and a sprinkle of those Personal Home Page (PHP) files. Every one of these pages is a plain text file I typed.
This site is private in the old-fashioned sense. No cookies, tracking scripts, analytics tags, no behavioral advertising pixels. I may look at logs when something breaks, but I’m also busy pursuing my non-tech goals. Right?
For more than twenty years, this has been a placeholder, a blog, a design archive, a music art design cubby, a place I avoided putting work, and now, intentionally, a small art gallery with a design studio attached to the back.
The ongoing repair log lives in the changelog, where changes are written down with a ton more ceremony than they probably deserve (and codenames, of course).
My current visual direction is somewhere between a small gallery, a museum wall, a studio filing cabinet, and whatever happens when those things are filtered through my particular brain.
The Museum Design System I’ve been calling it, is the collection of type, color, spacing, shadows, highlights, and grid settings, and carries special styles for plaques that are close to the wall, objects that extend out from the wall, a three color spot light system, a background color mesh system, and a blurred background photo system, all with custom settings per page. All set in the control panel on my machine in the studio.
This website used to have a lot of weight. This version 7 has better code that has made it more accessible, lean, and much faster for people to browse. This took a bit of time in between the more important life tasks and responsibilities but it’s been worth it! It’s worth looking at the carbon score for this site now as it’s gone from a miserably embarrassing F to a solid A! Win!
I am working on a page about the redesign of the site and it has a bunch about the page grid. It will show here when it’s published.
My own words, my photographs, and my artwork are published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. In plain speech:
Quoting a paragraph to argue with me is great idea and encouraged, actually.
But I think the code is a different matter, help yourself. I don’t think code is like prose very much. Code is strict and formulaic, natural language is free-flowing and rule-breaking… sometimes.
Every method for writing code here was learned by reading somebody else's markup in a View Source window, or learning from a book or sample code written by others. Take the CSS, the markup, take the ideas. No credit needed at all, although I'd love to see what you build. Please let me know!
Photographs are mine unless a otherwise noted.
But plenty of what appears in posts is not mine at all: album sleeves, magazine spreads, book pages, packaging, product shots, and objects I use. Every effort is made to link to creators and designers where possible. Those are reproduced here to talk about them, how they were designed, what the type is doing, why a layout works or doesn't. That is my commentary, criticism, and education, and I consider it fair use. Nothing here is sold, licensed, or monetized, no advertising runs against it, and none of it is offered under the license above, because those rights were never mine to give.
No sponsorships on this site and no affiliate links.
If something of yours is here and you would rather it weren't, send me a note and it comes down. No argument, no forms.
Nothing on this site is set in a webfont. The words you are reading right now are in whatever your own device calls its system typeface: San Francisco on a Mac, Segoe on Windows, Roboto on Android. So no fonts are downloaded, it renders instantly, and it already looks correct on your screen because the smart people.
Think of these fonts as placeholders. The plan is to set this place in a face of my own drawing.
The foundry is through here when it's live:
Small --font-size-0
BASE ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
BASE ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Base --font-size-1
BASE ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
BASE ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Large --font-size-2
BASE ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
BASE ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Massive --font-size-3
BASE ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
BASE ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Small --font-size-0
ROUNDED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
ROUNDED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Base --font-size-1
ROUNDED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
ROUNDED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Large --font-size-2
ROUNDED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
ROUNDED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Massive --font-size-3
ROUNDED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
ROUNDED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Small --font-size-0
MONOSPACED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
MONOSPACED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Base --font-size-1
MONOSPACED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
MONOSPACED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Large --font-size-2
MONOSPACED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
MONOSPACED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
Massive --font-size-3
MONOSPACED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
MONOSPACED ABCDEFabcdef Hamburgerfonstiv
--color-wall
The gallery wall, lights on or off
--color-ink
Body text, luminous when lights off
--color-copper
Captions, meta, secondary copy
--color-signal
The rare accent, the one that catches your eye
--color-plaque-bg
Wall-mounted thin surfaces, way-finding
--color-panel
A panel is different
There is so much great software written by creative designers and coders. I primarily discovered MacPaint in high school and my brain expanded large enough to let Mac software fill a large room in the brain.
This app had some of the most innovative text and coding features I’d ever seen.
One of the oldest yet still developing text editors for all sorts of things, especially web thingies.
https://bbedit.com
It’s not 'cosmically' great, but it’s really great.
Mac-based coding environment with extensions and the ability to write, share, and install extensions from others. Do you write code on a Mac? I think you’d like it. Okay, yeah, **it IS cosmically great**.
https://nova.app
Was called Transit initially, but shortly after was changed to Transmit.
Graphical user interface for FTP, etc. FTP server connections help you visually browse remote server files. Very helpful.
https://panic.com/transmit/Most of these apps you can install via Homebrew, which is handy for easily managing apps and updating them, as well. https://brew.sh
Tools, accessories, players of various media, but merely an instrument with guitar wires is a magical thing.
Purchased second hand, seems like perfect condition.
Uses an M lens adapter for attaching M-mount lenses (much more variety available)
Limited edition version of the stylish semi-hollow-body electric from Gretsch.
It feels like both an acoustic and an electric in nearly equal measure. Wild, with a WHAMMY BAR. Custom tuned by the guitar tech that services Stray Cats & Brian Setzer and his band. Who knew it was a local guy right down the street from me!
Picked up this used turntable on ebay from a seller in Yokosuka Japan a few years back.
It’s wonderful finding used tech that functions and looks perfectly new. Feels brand new.
https://us.technics.com/collections/turntablesAll the little details as I have the time to annotate them. More info can be found in all of the blog posts in Posts.
Version 6 of this site ran and leaned on LoRes for at least …what, 6 years now?
Designed by Zuzana Licko, a truly inspired type designer and artist. A dot matrix of pixels or blocks to represent ideas as abstract letterforms, very low-res, and very satisfying (yet a challenge to read!), I think it worked well. Dang I had fun with these fonts.
https://www.emigre.com/Fonts/Lo-ResA lot of the site’s thinking comes from old personal websites, early design communities, artist archives, museum labels, printed matter, record sleeves, book indexes, and always looking for more.
The only way I learned to write code, was from browsing the personal sites of other designers and developers.
If it wasn’t for the true creativity of others, for the blog posts where techniques were not just shared but debated over, and the knowledge and wisdom that others have shared, that has fueled my own passion to write styles and markup, I wouldn’t be here today, and I love that others and myself love making art on the internet. Thank you all.
One of the most compelling examples of design community at the time.
This design hub site was all wrapped up with the best comic strips, character animations, link blogs, etc. So inspiring!
https://k10k.comPresumably surfers wanted to surf when the tide was horrible, so empty pools brought them landward.
Skateboarding pools started to boost the skateboard scene and larger and wider pool decks were born. The scene became an industry, and amateur and professional artists and designers took to the medium easily and created a rich history. Of course, snowboarding, skiing, action sports, and even video games got into the mix. 720 was a fantastic arcade game.
Teachers and professors have always been a real boost to my own artistic self-confidence.
For example, some of my favorite classes in school were art and design history classes, spinning the tales of people inspired long ago to create and make a living creating. Sometimes I wish I were in art school full time.
The world, it runs on energy. What makes the energy? I think it makes itself.
Love coffee.
I mean, it’s everything.
I mean, it’s Lego, right?
I somehow still have Lego bricks from my childhood. None of the siblings wanted them. That was a long time ago, when bricks were made from Mesopotamian potash and river mud.
Since visiting Paris in the 2000s, and sitting down by myself at an espresso bar courtyard for an espresso and seeing the coffee biscuit like this? Yeah, life changing.
Everyday I can, really. Totally indulgent.
Praise is powerful. High, low, mediocre? I’ll take it.
But I love criticism, too, eh? So load it on. Something not look right? There’s a reason: I didn’t see it or it’s sandboxy. Bring it. I can handle it.
Wrote a Sketchbooks Post and Shelf artifact. Tried to streamline one page sync to server as a task for things like blog posts. Not bad. Moving forward is good.
Technics blog post!
Shelf modified for easier browsing and better library cards, to boot! Music has custom labels now, too, but nothing like v6 had with the animated vinyl, cssettes, reel-2-reel, et al. But maybe one day!
It’s not ‘Band’, it’s ‘Artist’ and all music related fields and data are now extremely compliant. I think.
data and music release info cleaned a bit. It was me who opted to bring in this info.
Added a few books to the shelf, cleaned page data, etc. Boring stuff I wish were automatic.
Guestbook entries! Thank you everyone! https://lukedorny.com/guestbook
Switched the software source of a few apps to hombrew, then added them with authors and links to the colophon page.
Created a stanadard measuring tape for each shop item and artwork, shared measurements, etc., for easy editing. Phew.
Yes, it’s 1:30am. There is so much to change, fix, and clean up. I suppose that’s the advantage of interent over print design.
Thanks for making it all the way through the back rooms. Come back anytime.