Welcome to the colophon! A hidden corner of my website for technical miscellany and such like.
💻 This website
This website is built with the Hugo static site generator, with a simple theme that I designed myself. It utilises Bootstrap 5 and Hugo’s responsive image processing to load quickly without using much of your data. The content is written in Markdown which is my favourite writing tool. It’s a big learning curve but once you figure it out, Hugo is simple, fast, flexible and free. The site is hosted on Github and delivered by Netlify.
The colours are from the ‘Delve’ palette I created in 2014 for my YouTube channel. The typefaces are nothing fancy, just your browser’s standard serif and sans-serif fonts. The photograph of me was taken by Helen Bartlett, a very talented family photographer based in London. It’s the only photograph of me taken during the pandemic. The image of me on the homepage is a self-portrait.
This site runs no analytics to track your data. Here is my artificial intelligence declaration.
💌 My Newsletter
By the end of 2018 my freelance work was such that I no longer had time to make personal video essays. I created The Third Something to have a place to create something small each week. Five years later, it is still going strong with more than a thousand engaged readers.
After five years on Substack, I decided to leave and the newsletter is now managed by Beehiiv. Here’s an explanation for that change. But in short it comes down to this: as I build a body of creative work it’s really important to me that I own that work and the means of its distribution as much as possible.
🔧 Apps and Tools
For my artwork I use a mixture of inks and pencils. My favourite pencils to draw with are the Blackwing 602s and I love Faber-Castell’s Polychromous range for their rich colour and soft lines. Like many people I default to Moleskine for my sketchbooks - the artist’s sketchbook has nice thick paper that can handle ink and watercolour. For digital art and cleanup I use an iPad with Procreate.
I write almost everything in the markdown syntax using iA writer, which I have used for six years or more. Highland2 is a great tool for writing comics scripts and screenplays in markdown.
I create my video work with the Adobe Suite for the most part. Motion is my favourite After Effects plugin. I have used the Rode Podcaster microphone to record voice over and podcasts for at least six years. It’s big, heavy and sets off the alarms at airport security, but sounds great.
And for productivity, I use Notion to organise my thoughts and my life, and Alfred to speed things along.