Colophon

I’ve tried as far as possible to use only free and open-source tools to put this site together. The CMS is Textpattern and all HTML and CSS code was written using the Atom text editor.

The graphics have been produced with Alchemy, Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and Scribus.

I’ve also made similar choices with the type, choosing free fonts with open licences. Body copy is set in ParaType’s PT Sans, partly because I like it and partly because it’s one of the few free text faces I could find that renders well on Windows at smaller sizes. Quoted matter is set in PT Serif. Headlines are set in Fanwood Text from the League of Movable Type (it renders slightly better than Fanwood at screen resolutions) and I’ve additionally used League Gothic also from the League of Movable Type.

Updates, Autumn 2018

This is the second edition of cunabula.io, while the design is based on, and very similar to, the original which I launched in 2011, the new edition has been completely rewritten to take advantage of CSS Grid and other changes that have taken place in web technology in the intervening years. It’s also a lot more ‘finished’.

Many of the things I wanted to do with the design back then were difficult with a float-based layout and particularly difficult when trying to write and design posts for the site all the .push and .pull styles and working out whether nesting something in something else was going to require another class to fix some padding or margin issue. It wasn’t fun to add content to at all, so, as you might notice from the post dates, I didn’t. Grid is a lot more intuitive, the code is far cleaner, and most importantly it actually works.

The first edition was coded with Notepad++, I switched to Atom as I’ve really enjoyed using it while learning C++ and for its out-of-the-box integration with Github.

For the design of the first edition, and the beginning of the refresh, I stored the files on Dropbox so I could access them in multiple locations easily. I switched to Github so I could get a better handle on how to use it for my coding projects and I’ve documented the design refresh in a repository there.

I work really iteratively and CSS Grid is/was new to me so I found it really helpful to use Github to wrangle the process into some form of order, especially during my frequent missteps and the several times when I wanted to try a big global change that I entirely sure about. Being able to create a branch of the code to work on rather than a full copy of everything is so much better. Also the Issue tracker (and its integration with the Project boards) is brilliant, even if you’re basically just writing notes to yourself.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to Jen Simmons, I couldn’t have done any of the work without her Layout Land YouTube series and labs.jensimmons.com.

Finally, but invaluable to the process, the toolset provided by Firefox Developer Edition and alongside that, and always open in at least one tab, (but usually more) developer.mozilla.org.