This post was originally posted on January 21, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
What’s old is new again.
Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 31.
I remember learning about hieroglyphics in elementary school. Hieroglyphics, we were taught, were an early form of written communication in ancient Egypt, less advanced* than our modern writing system. We were given the assignment to make our own pictograms and write messages with them. (I’m pretty sure my daughter had the same assignment last year.) It was a fun experiment, but I remember thinking: Who would ever want to communicate with pictograms?
Well, turns out hieroglyphics are making a comeback. This time, they are called emoji.
I was a little late to the emoji train. I will freely admit that I thought they were a complete waste of time for a while, but I eventually came around. Emoji are fun and convey emotion and concepts well. I’m still pretty conservative with my emoji use — I rarely use more than one at at time — but I absolutely use them.
We as a society have embraced emoji. One of the biggest incentives for upgrading our smartphone operating system is to get new emoji. There are heated discussions about what emoji should be included in the next Unicode release. Micro.blog is experimenting with using emoji as tags — similar to how hashtags are used on Twitter — and it’s awesome. Communicating with pictograms isn’t primitive. It’s an effective way to get your message across.
“Communicating with pictograms isn’t primitive. It’s an effective way to get your message across.”
I wanted to make an emoji shirt and reference the similarity to hieroglyphics, so I built a pyramid** of emoji. It was tough to find an emoji font that I could use for a product like this one.*** Most charge extra for using their design in a commercial product. I finally found Google’s open source Noto family, which includes two emoji fonts. I didn’t like the faces in Noto, but the rest of the set was great and perfect for my pyramid. I decided to use the black and white version because I fell in love with the high contrast look.
* Of course, I later learned that Egyptian hieroglyphics were much more advanced than we were taught in elementary school. I’m pretty sure this is another example of Western cultural bias here. Modern society assumed pictograms were primitive and letterforms were superior. Turns out pictograms can be a powerful way to communicate, too.
** I was fascinated by pyramids, mostly because of David Macaulay’s book, Pyramids. For a period of time, I loved to read about all things ancient Egyptian.
*** Have you tried to use emoji in print? Let’s just say it’s much harder than you’d think it would be.
Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.
This post was originally posted on January 18, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
Some notes on how I’ve connected Micro.blog to my existing Squarespace site.
I’ve enjoyed using Micro.blog for the last couple months. It’s developing as an interesting writing and sharing platform and it’s already become my first destination for finding new content.
There are several ways to set up your Micro.blog feed. The easiest way is to use Micro.blog hosting. Everything just works for $5/month. If you don’t have an existing site, this is the way to go.
But one of the interesting things about Micro.blog is that you can use it with pretty much any blogging platform as long as it has an RSS feed, so I decided to see if I could connect my existing Squarespace hosted site to Micro.blog. I’ve had my Squarespace site for almost 10 years. I’m happy with Squarespace so I don’t really want to move Sketchbook B over to another service like Wordpress.
For anyone interested in using Squarespace with Micro.blog, I wanted to detail how I’ve configured my Micro.blog account with Squarespace and talk about two options for how to set it up and my workflow for posting to Micro.blog.
Option 1: Add a new blog page
I added a new blog page to my Squarespace site and named it “Microblog.” It’s just a standard Squarespace blog page, so you can add text to the header and footer. My microblog lives at [**sketchbookb.com/micro**](https://www.sketchbookb.com/micro).
Then I headed over to Micro.blog and added the new RSS feed. On the Micro.blog web interface, you edit these settings on the Account page, in the Feeds section. I originally tried to add **www.sketchbookb.com/micro/ to Micro.blog, which worked, but didn’t seem to work consistently. After a little experimentation and some research, it seems that **sketchbookb.squarespace.com/micro/ works better as the feed address.*
And that’s it. Now, anything I post to my Squarespace microblog page posts to Micro.blog.
Option 2: Use a category on your main blog
I was also able to connect my main blog to Micro.blog. Any post I tag with the category “micro” is added to Micro.blog. All I had to do was add **sketchbookb.squarespace.com/journal/ as a feed in Micro.blog. Since I typically post longer content to my blog, Micro.blog pulls just the title and provides a link to the post. It’s a pretty elegant solution.
Micro.blog lets you add multiple feeds to your account. So I have both option 1 and option 2 set up. I use the microblog page for my twitter-like posts. And if I want to share one of my longer essays — like this one — on Micro.blog, I just tag it with “micro” and the title and link are posted automatically.
What works.
Once it’s configured, everything pretty much just works. I post to Squarespace and it shows up on Micro.blog (with cross-posting to Twitter). Some other things that just work:
Formatting for inline links, bold and italics is really easy.
If you change a post with 24 hours, it edits it in the Micro.blog feed.
Cross posting to Twitter works great. I didn’t think it would be useful, but it completely is. I don’t post directly to Twitter anymore. All of my posts start on my own site.
What doesn’t work.
Connecting Squarespace and Micro.blog works well, but there are some minor tradeoffs. Since you are hosting your own feed and Micro.blog doesn’t have API access for Squarespace, you can’t start new posts from the Micro.blog app. Instead, you start your post on your Squarespace site, and then do replies and engagement in the Micro.blog app. It’s an extra step. Some other issues:
There isn’t a character counter in the web interface or iOS app. So you can’t easily tell how close you are to 280 characters.
Sometimes there is a short delay between when you add the post to your site and when it appears on Micro.blog.
If you want to have a list of all your Micro.blog posts someplace on your Squarespace site using a Summary block… yeah… that’s not going to work. Squarespace doesn’t really know what to do with a post in that context with no title or summary.
Because Squarespace doesn’t have an API or any hooks into services like IFTTT, you can’t automate some processes. For example, I’d love to copy my Instagram posts to the microblog using IFTTT, but that doesn’t seem possible.***
My workflow
My workflow for posting to Micro.blog is simple. I add a new blog post via the Squarespace web interface or using the Squarespace Blog iOS app. The microblog post has no title and consists of 280 characters or less. For a photo blog post, I add a picture to the post.
If I want to read other user posts or comment, I do that from within the Micro.blog app on my phone or on the Mac.
This workflow is more complicated than just posting and responding in one app like I used to do with Twitteriffic or like I could do with Micro.blog if I had a different hosting set up. But I prefer having all my content originate from Sketchbook B so for me, it’s worth the minor inconvenience.
Squarespace and open social
One last thought… I really wish that Squarespace would reintroduce an API that allows for interconnectivity with a new class of open social networks like Micro.blog that rely on RSS, JSON feeds, webmentions and more. I’ve been using Squarespace long enough, that I remember when they had an API. If open social networks take off — and I realize that’s a big if — expanded support for microblogging and connections to supporting apps and services are the kind of premium features that a product like Squarespace could offer.
It’s still early
Micro.blog is still in the early days, with Manton having just recently opened signups to the general public. The service is evolving in really interesting and fascinating ways.**** As Micro.blog changes, it’s possible my Squarespace setup will become less than ideal, but for now, I’m sticking with my Squarespace site and I’m happy that I’ve been able to integrate the two services.
* Squarespace recommends that for podcasts, it’s best to use the username.squarespace.com structure for that feed. I’m not sure why, but I guess the same logic applies to Micro.blog.
** I use the iOS app. There is an Android app as well.
*** I have a couple of ideas of how I might work around this, but it’s going to becomplex.
**** I 💚 Emoji tags
Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create.
Happy fifth anniversary, Drip. Thanks for the coffee.
This post was originally posted on January 14, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
It’s simple, really.
Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 30.
Love takes many forms. We love our partner or spouse. We love our children, our family and our friends. We love our pets. We love our neighbors, even if they are different than we are. We love others, even if they are in a different part of the world.*
We show love in many ways. We show it through our actions and our words. We show it through our compassion. We use our time and energy to serve others. Love is the foundation of a positive world.
Tomorrow is a holiday to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Love was his guiding compass. And it should be ours today.
Visually for my “love” shirt, I wanted to take a minimalist approach to the word love. I didn’t want to design anything flashy or do a bunch of hand lettering. Just simple and straightforward.
* And especially if their corner of the world isn’t as nice and safe as ours.
Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.
This post was originally posted on January 7, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
I made a red velvet cake last week.
From scratch. It was a recipe that my mom made when I was growing up, but it was originally my Grandmother Wertz’s recipe. My grandmother died when I was very young, so to me, red velvet always makes me think of my mom.
My mom passed away almost 17 years ago. She taught me to cook many things, but this red velvet cake was not one of them. All I knew was that it was difficult, and that she messed up the icing the first time she tried to make it. I can make pretty much anything that she made, but I had never tried to make the red velvet cake. I’ll be honest – I was scared. Scared to fail. Afraid that if I messed it up, I wouldn’t have someone to call for advice. I was on my own. So I never attempted it.
A few weeks ago, I started thinking about making her red velvet cake. I don’t know what triggered my urge to bake the unbakeable, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I got the recipe from my sister and decided to bake the cake Christmas Eve. (Because obviously, we had nothing else to do that night…) I ran to the grocery store and got the ingredients. I found our fanciest cake stand. And I pulled out the Kitchen Aid mixer that my parents gave us as a wedding gift.
The recipe wasn’t that hard, but like most older recipes, it was procedural. Lots of steps and precise measurements. The cake batter came together okay, but the icing was another story. This recipe doesn’t use a cream cheese icing like a lot of modern red velvet cakes do. It’s more like a butter cream. I ruined the first batch of icing and had to make a second batch. About 1:00 Christmas morning, I finished icing the cake. It looked exactly like I remembered.
Christmas evening, after dinner, we cut into the red velvet cake – giant pie-sized wedges like my mom used to cut. It tasted like I remembered. Not too sweet, perfect texture. Even the kids loved it. I will freely admit that I teared up a little upon realizing that I had successfully pulled it off.
As I think about the year ahead, I realize that many of the things I’ve been scared of… many of the things I’ve put off attempting… the fear is all in my head. In 2018, I’m going to put those fears aside, branch out and try new things.
(And now that I can make the red velvet cake, I’m definitely going to bake it again.)
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
This post was originally posted on January 7, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
Photography was one of my earliest artistic influences.
Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 29.
I was a photographer long before I was a designer. My father loved cameras and had a selection of Minolta 35mm cameras, lens, flashes and other accessories. They were often used for family pictures after church and vacation photos. My parents kept tons of photo albums around and so I grew up with photography everywhere.
When I started high school, I took pictures for the yearbook and newspaper. I signed up for a class at Midlands Tech on photography and darkroom skills. I worked in USC Aiken’s darkroom some — my high school didn’t have it’s own darkroom — but I eventually got an enlarger at home and printed my own images in the bathroom.
I used my dad’s cameras for most of this, but at some point during my senior year, I picked up a used Minolta X-700 to be my camera. I shot a bunch of high school sports and needed a long, but affordable lens so I used an old 200mm f3.5 lens that we purchased from KEH in Atlanta. I borrowed one of my dad’s motor drives and that combo was my primary camera set up for a number of years. When I went to college at the University of South Carolina, I worked in student media and shot football and basketball games with it. I also worked a bunch of concerts with that camera — Beastie Boys, Nine Inch Nails, Gin Blossoms, Green Day and more.
I discovered design when I was in college, but photography was my first love and one of my oldest artistic influences. I’m glad I got the experience of shooting on film and working in a darkroom. I’m grateful that I had to learn to shoot with manual focus before autofocus happened. I’m thankful for autofocus and digital photography, but I feel like I understand photography better because I had to do things manually.
“I discovered design when I was in college, but photography was my first love and one of my oldest artistic influences.”
At some point, I switched to Canon autofocus when I purchased an A2E with “eye-control focus.” And then to digital SLRs when my oldest child was born. I gave my old Minolta gear to my dad who collected cameras and he had them displayed with other old cameras he had used or found at yard sales. A couple of years ago, he was cleaning out some things and asked if I wanted some of his old camera gear. I took several of the old Minolta bodies, including my X-700, and displayed them in my office — next to my darkroom clock.
I wanted to create a shirt based on my love of photography. And that X-700 kept popping in my head. So I recreated it, taking some editorial license. It’s one of the most detailed vector illustrations I’ve ever done and I had a blast with it.
Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.
A year ago, I decided to lessen my reliance on Twitter. Here’s my progress so far…
This post was originally posted on January 3, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
In the last year, the narrative has shifted from Twitter’s possible sale to issues with abuse and hatred. Twitter increased the character count to 280 and that’s worked out fine, but its user growth is still flat. As Twitter tries to jumpstart the service, I still believe the likelihood of Twitter imploding within the next few years is high.
I thought I’d revisit my areas of concern from my previous post and share what I’ve done to mitigate those issues.
I’d lose a bunch of contacts. My first concern was that I’d lose a bunch of contacts that I only had on Twitter. I’m a little less concerned about this than I was a year ago. I’ve slowly started to connect with more people, experts and brands on other services like LinkedIn and Facebook. I’ve still got a ways to go and will continue to expand the roster of people I follow on other services.
I’d change how I watch live events. I’m still using Twitter during live events. For me, this is the hardest to replace. During the Sugar Bowl and the Rose Bowl this week,1 I kept up with commentary from reporters and friends on Twitter. Following commentary on live events is challenging through Facebook. Posts don’t appear in sequential order because of their algorithm.
Twitter is simply the best option to handle streaming written commentary during an event. I’m sure I could use something like Snapchat, but I don’t know enough people on Snapchat for it to be useful for me.2
I’d have to rethink how I find articles and stories. This was a big issue for me, but I’ve kind of solved it… by cheating a little bit. I’ve started using Nuzzel3 to surface headlines from my social media services. Not familiar with Nuzzel? It’s a pretty simple service. You connect your social media services — Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — and Nuzzel tells you what links your friends (and friends of your friends) are sharing. This works really well for finding the links and articles that your social circle is talking about… without actually going into Twitter or Facebook. It’s cheating because 95% of the links that come up are from people I follow on Twitter. I really like the service and I see lots of links I would have otherwise missed. I highly recommend it.
I’ve upgraded to Feedly Pro and I’m being more intentional about subscribing to interesting RSS feeds. I’m going to continue to expand my use of Feedly.
I find Facebook useless for finding actual news stories unless I want to know “27 Secrets from The Last Jedi” or some crappy, clickbait slideshow link. And LinkedIn seems equally useless for finding content that I’m interested in.
I need to give Medium another chance, but for some reason, I just haven’t been interested in building an account on Medium with people I follow and read regularly. Maybe that’s something to look into more in 2018.
I’d have to rethink how I share content. Sharing the content I create is another issue. I’m sharing more widely on other services, but I’m still using Twitter. For 2018, I’m shifting most of my short format posting to Micro.Blog with automatic cross posting to Twitter.
And to promote most of my blog posts or interesting content, I schedule posts through Buffer to several different services.
I’ve thought about reposting my blog posts and articles on Medium, but it seems like a lot of work to post everything twice. (And only posting to Medium is not an option for me. I want everything hosted on my site.) I may try Medium again.
I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I can’t get into Dribbble. I love the concept and I love the community, but it just doesn’t match up with the way I work. Still, the community is great so maybe I’ll give it another shot in 2018.
And finally, Pinterest. For some of my content — specifically my shirt and product designs — Pinterest is a great service. But I haven’t really spent that much time in Pinterest personally, so that might be another avenue I explore in 2018.
I’d change the way I use Facebook. So Facebook… I really do think that we’ve reached the point where you have to have a Facebook account, unfortunately. In today’s communications environment, Facebook is a necessary evil. Over the last year, Facebook has had its own problems with hatred, fake news and discrimination, though, and I’d love to reduce my reliance on Facebook, too.
Facebook is a great place to share family photos, but for serious content, I don’t think it works well. I’ve started to build an audience for the Sketchbook B Facebook page and I’m going to continue to promote the page and hopefully expand the number of followers. That said, I feel like Facebook’s algorithm is going to hide my content unless I pay to promote it, which I may start to do selectively.
I’d spend more time on Instagram. I still love Instagram.4 A couple years ago, I switched my account from a personal account to a business account. The bonus was that I could see viewer metrics, but the drawback was that it would only let me cross post to my Facebook Sketchbook B business page, not my personal profile. Since most of my Instagram shots are family or fun shots, I want to cross post those to my personal Facebook page. I don’t really care about metrics so I recently switched back to the personal account.
I plan to cross post my fun family Instagram images to Twitter and Facebook more regularly. I also plan to manually repost from Instagram to Micro.Blog. It’s a little bit of work, but I like having everything on my site.
I’d try to find a replacement. A little over a year ago, I was guessing that if Twitter disappeared, someone would rise up and meet the needs of its former user base. I didn’t have to wait until Twitter disappeared. A few months after I wrote my post, Manton Reece launched his Micro.Blog Kickstarter project. Micro.Blog is a service that allows me to host my microblog posts — basically, tweets — on my own site and then share through a social media service. Manton’s done a great job so far, and I really think that Micro.Blog is the tip of the iceberg for a resurgence of the independent web. The service isn’t for everyone and it’s in the early days. Manton is still figuring out how some features will work, but I think it’s a great fit for me. (I’m going to write a lot more about Micro.Blog this month, including why I’m excited about it, and detailing how I configured my Squarespace blog to work with Micro.Blog.)
Reality check. I’m not completely giving up on Twitter, though. I’ve been a Twitter user since 2007 and Twitter is part of my daily routine. It’s just a less enjoyable part of my daily routine now. This year, I backed Twitteriffic for Mac on Kickstarter because I wanted my favorite Twitter client on my Mac.
Times are changing, though, and I honestly believe that we all need to be diversifying — and if possible, owning — our social media presence. Becoming less reliant on the big social media behemoths is the first step.
I look forward to revisiting my progress next year.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
I joke that I’m a grouchy old guy that doesn’t “get” Snapchat. The truth is that very few of my friends are on Snapchat and so it really isn’t that useful to me. If I had a bunch of friends active on Snapchat, I’d be there. Even if the interface is crap. ↩︎
I tried out Nuzzel based on Jason Snell’s recommendation on one of his many podcasts. ↩︎
This post was originally posted on December 31, 2017 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
More than just an art lesson.
Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 28.
I can’t remember what year of elementary school I was introduced to the concept of perspective. All I know is that once I was introduced to single point perspective, I drew cubes on everything. Later, when I was introduced to two-point perspective, I’d break out a ruler and draw massive cityscapes.
Perspective, for some reason, was an early art lesson that made an impression. I think it was because once you understood the concept of perspective, you looked at the world in a different way. What something looks like depends entirely on your point of view.
Perspective, it turns out, is more than just an art lesson. Learning to take into account other people’s point of view is critical to understanding and working with other people. Everything is a matter of perspective.
Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.
