Another long overdue update

Well, it’s been another long while since I last dragged out ye 0ld ‘industry blog’. I think this is largely because nothing industry-related that I’ve read over the last several months has infuriated me sufficiently enough to post! Well, that and a lack of time and some uncertainty over the official position of my employer vis-à-vis blogging. Ah well.

Speaking of work, the primary reason I’m dragging this out of semi-retirement is that UWA is finally running a 23 Things program, and I’m one of the primary presenters. As such, it behooves me to practice what I’m preaching.

I’ve handled the online side of things for the program – namely the blog and the content in it. I’ve had a lot of fun building up the blog, dusting off my limited coding skills for the second major project in six months. I wanted the program to have a theme of sorts, to give the participants a feeling of being at least a little bit special. Originally, this was going to be a steampunkish pseudo-victorian theme – the 23 Things would be a Great Exhibition of sorts. However, my limited artistic skills let me down, and in striving for Victoriana I inadvertantly created something that, the consensus was, is rather more Wild West, and decided to stick with that – for many doing the program, the internet is a bit of a wild and unexplored place with many dangers.

I did, however, do something very naughty with the blog. Knowing it to be made primarily for internal use, I used a swag of fonts that aren’t web-safe, including a number that cost serious money (well, for fonts, anyway), so if you have a look at it now and you’re not sitting in the UWA library, it’ll probably look pretty odd indeed. I chose ‘pretty for my target audience’ over standards, and for that I am (slightly) sorry. If you’re curious, the font families used are:

• Top navigation: “Engravers MT” “Perpetua Titling MT” or “Copperplate Gothic Bold”
• H3, meta, other navigation elements: “Blackadder ITC”, “Monotype Corsiva” or “Lucida Handwriting”
• H4, tables: Algerian, Playbill or Impact
• Entry titles, H5: “Goudy Stout”, Broadway or Stencil