All About Antipixel
Have you noticed how rare the colophon has become? It's a great shame, the disappearance of these little windows of typographic recognition and biblio-husbandry minutiae. Hopefully we'll see a resurgence of this polite nod to the reader's curiosity, and so forthwith some gripping information on this site's
Before we go any further, though, let's get one thing straight: this is a personal site and the thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own (unless I've stolen them from other people). This site is in no way connected with my employment, past or present, and absolutely nothing I've written should be taken as expressing or implying anything on my employer's behalf. As if it would.
This is version 2 of Antipixel featuring a somewhat new look for the 2003 model year — a look that seems destined to run into 2005 as the time available for redesigning eludes me [update: it did]. Version 1, bastard offspring of the Encyclopaedia Bombastica and Omegaville, was launched in October, 2001.
Biospiel
Beach meeting: the author somewhat gormlessly discussing how to bring wi-fi to the shores of Sagami Bay, Japan. Photo: MJD-S
Jeremy Hedley was born in Western Australia where he spent the first two thirds of his life. The most recent third has occurred mostly in Tokyo. He came to Japan on a whim which slowly and happily mutated into an overpowering inertia, and it is this that keeps him here now. He likes it this way.
He lives in a ramshackle old house in the southwest of the city and works as web manager of an international development research institution. For fourteen years he has been an unworthy assistant to the translator Yoko Miyagi.
He has been a teacher, a designer, a copywriter, the creative director of production and advertising agencies, a victim of the dot-com débâcle, and a damn good sport about it all. He has won awards (but not for being a good sport) and his handwriting once appeared, by dint of its exotic occidentalism and two-fisted macho posturing, in an advertisement for ham with Sylvester Stallone.
If you'd like to get in touch, by all means He'd love to hear from you whatever the reason.
Code
XHTML
Antipixel is coded using strict XHTML 1.0 because web standards are important and, besides, it was kind of fun in a masochistic way.
CSS
The site uses Cascading Style Sheets for all layout and formatting, so it could look weird (but should still be readable) on outmoded browsers.
If you're having browser doubts, help is at hand. Please upgrade your browser if you can because style sheets are going to be everywhere soon, they just make such good sense.
Invaluable CSS help was provided by Glish.com, Blue Robot and Albin.net. Eric Meyer's Salmon book is as good as it gets if you're looking for a definitive reference.
Typography
Bitmaps
Susan Kare is a genius whose work is familiar to millions of people around the world, whether they know it or not. Antipixel uses her FiveDots font, a characteristically quirky and beautiful tiny little bitmapped wonder of a thing. The logo uses Silkscreen by Jason Kottke, another classic.
Style Sheets
As for all of the type rendered by your browser (i.e., 99% of it) well, this is the web – there's no telling what you're getting. The style sheet gives Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Unicode, Verdana, Geneva, Lucida, Arial, Helvetica and then the generic sans-serif. Lucida (by Kris Holmes & Charles Bigelow) gets called in its Grande incarnation for those lucky enough to be using Mac OS X while the second instance should kick in for Windows users. The third call for Lucida ought to apply to Unix machines which may lack Verdana. Geneva is a fall-back for Macintoshes of all stripes while Arial and Helvetica are the teetotalling spinster aunts huddling in the corner at every family gathering.
Quote Wizardry
Quotation marks, apostrophes, em dashes and ellipses are provided courtesy of SmartyPants, a free Movable Type plug-in from John Gruber of DaringFireball. If you like elegant solutions to annoying problems, you'll love SmartyPants.
Production
Made with a Macintosh running OS X
Hosting
Antipixel is hosted by Segment Publishing. I can't recommend these guys highly enough (and, no, I don't get kickbacks).
Software
Rest assured that only the very finest applications have been used to prepare these pages. The templates are hand-coded with the world's best text editor, BBEdit from Bare Bones Software and the pages are rendered through Movable Type from Ben and Mena Trott. Adobe Photoshop is used to prepare all of the graphics and photographs. Any audio on the site, and there is some recently, has been recorded and edited with SoundStudio.
Photography
Pictures exposed on film are made with a Contax T2 or Nikon FM2 using either a Nikkor 28mm 1:2.8 or an 80–200mm 1:4.5, but I don't use film too much anymore. Digital photographs were taken with a Nikon CoolPix 990 prior to the autumn of 2003 when I became the proud but impoverished owner of a second-hand Nikon D1X and, gradually, a small selection of Nikkor lenses. Raw files are opened in Nikon Capture then sent in 16-bit mode to Photoshop CS for mangling.
Other Bits & Pieces
You can change the style sheets on the main page thanks to code by Paul Sowden. Some Movable Type plug-ins on which the site relies were written by Brad Choate. Daniel Bogan, John Gruber, resonance, Phil Ringnalda and Mark Pilgrim are great sources of information and insight (among others too numerous to name). A heartfelt thanks to everyone.
Rights & Administrivia
Copyright
Antipixel is © 2001-2007 by me, Jeremy Hedley, with all rights reserved. This means you may not steal the contents or the design. Sorry, but I'm funny that way. If you'd like to use anything from the site, get in touch because chances are I want to help you. If you steal without getting in touch, I will find out and ridicule you and your name will soon be mud throughout the civilised world.
Linking
Linking to any page of the site is encouraged (this is the web after all). Bandwidth hijacking, however, is a no-no and anyone pulling files off my server for use on another site without permission is considered to be doing A Bad Thing. Use common sense, folks, and be considerate. Bandwidth costs money.
Who Owns What
You own your words, as the saying goes, which I take to mean copyright and responsibility. This means that comments belong to their authors, and Antipixel takes no responsibility for anything nasty anyone says. In the immortal words of Sergeant Schultz, I know nothing.
Occasionally duplicate comments get posted, tags go unclosed, long URLs snake their way into adjacent columns, &c. For the sake of good housekeeping, I may tidy things up, however I'll never edit the actual content of your comment.
Privacy Policy
The e-mail address you provide when writing comments is never displayed on the site. Your name will be linked to any URL that you enter.
Your e-mail address will never be sold, rented, given or otherwise made available to other sites, mailing lists, or third parties. There's a special place in hell waiting for people who send unsolicited commercial e-mail, and the sooner they disappear from the face of the earth the better.
When you post a comment your IP number is logged. This never appears on the site and will never be made available to third parties.
If someone breaks into my house, sedates my dobermans, deactivates the laser security system whose beams criss-cross my smoke-filled room and steals my computer, I may be unable to keep any of the promises I've just made. Security measures are in place, however, and I'm not unduly worried about this happening.
Advertising
Antipixel doesn't accept advertising. If a comment gets posted that looks like advertising it will probably be trashed. If you post more than one comment that looks like advertising, your IP number will be banned from the site, no questions asked, no correspondence entered into.
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