Design

I’m not a visual designer, but I do like pretty things. On the top of my mind recently has been the idea of my Purple Owl Theme. It comes from the “Night Owl” theme on MonoLisa’s website. Blue background with a big purple highlight. Light gray as a text color. I love the theme, and I’ve tried to make a version of it for Obsidian. In doing so, I realized that actually figuring out what colors goes where is confusing. Colors that make sense on the MonoLisa site don’t make sense in my Obsidian theme. There are also a bunch of additional color and syntax settings for something like my Obsidian notes that aren’t really matched to any of the theme values from the MonoLisa site. ...

This is an idea I’ve had for a while. One of my personal missions in life is to connect people. I do this through community aspects at work, through teaching acroyoga and Thai message, but how do I get even more people involved? I once read about a project, but have been unable to find it online, where a group of people mailed out a bunch of notebooks, asked people to hold on to them for a couple days and fill out some pages and then send them to another users. When the project was done the group had some amazing works of art. ...

I love backpacks. I even bought a domain to talk about my backpacks, though it isn’t up and running. For about a year prior to Covid, I had been carrying the same backpack. This was a huge step for me, because I often switch between packs as needed. I was blissfully happy with my Patagonia Black Hole 32L in Hammots Gold (color no longer available). Then a friend of mine convinced me to try a new brand of pack, Evergoods. ...

I had the idea for writing this post a couple of weeks ago, but then I picked up Twenty Bits from Dan Cedarholm, and his first tip is about making a T-shirt. That solidified that I needed to write this post. I’m a computer person. I spend 95% of my days in a simple T-Shirt. I do have some plain shirts, but most of mine have sort of graphic on them. I guess my obsession with them started in college when I would get about 12 a year in college for my cheerleading team. Each shirt would have a different design on it. ...

Does anyone else obsess about fonts? I mean, I know there are graphics designers and various other people who go nuts about them, but I’m wondering in general is a large portion of population or just clustered around my friends? While I have fonts that I go to, and I enjoy the Macklemore song where he calls out “Gold Fonts”, I don’t really know as much about them as I feel I should. Fonts are so powerful. They help words take shape. They can help you easily identify words or make text incredibly hard to read. As someone with a reading disability, pattern recognizing a signature of word is a trick I use to read a little bit faster. Good fonts can help that, bad fonts can hurt that. ...