nanovivid

• Flugtag
  "We're going to figure this out eventually!"

As I’ve alluded to previously, I have a bit of a weakness for droning, repetitive music. I’m not sure how it happens, but I sometimes have an almost physical reaction to it that feels as if I’m being wrapped in a comforting blanket. No other artist that I’ve discovered can do this to me quite like Tim Hecker.

I discovered Hecker’s music quite by accident. I think I stumbled across Harmony In Ultraviolet while checking out From Here We Go Sublime by The Field on Amazon. Harmony was listed in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section, and for some reason, it caught my eye. I clicked on over and was presented with this brilliant review (seriously, go read it). That right there was reason enough (well, along with checking out the samples) for me to stick the album on my wishlist.

Fast forward to January. I had gotten From Here We Go Sublime the previous fall and was thoroughly enjoying it. For those of you who don’t know, The Field makes amazingly ear-wormy minimal techno. His songs don’t bother with verses, choruses, breakdowns, or builds because they don’t need to. Instead of having a couple hooks in the song, he chooses exactly the right hooks and then loops them. Even though it’s completely repetitive, there are all kinds of tiny alterations and changes happening throughout each song, keeping it from becoming boring. I listened to the album quite a lot and The Field is currently at #17 on my Last.fm profile.

Then I finally bought Harmony In Ultraviolet and, well, here’s what happened to my music listening (courtesy of LastGraph):

Harmony is a massive album. I think the term “ambient” gets close, but it’s also very droning, sometimes very dark, and often noisy and full of static. The first time I played it, I simply sat in shock of the incredible, almost overwhelming beauty. Whether it’s the time-worn loops of Chimeras, the calming fuzz of Spring Heeled Jack Flies Tonight, or the massive synths of by Radio Spiricom, the music is not quite like anything I’ve ever heard before. I think it was also custom-tailored for my drone-loving brain.

I’ve also purchased the (oddly punctuated) Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, which is a fantastic album in its own right. Where Harmony can be imposing and almost overwhelming, Haunt Me is warm and calm.

Tim Hecker’s music is in some ways the polar opposite of The Field’s. There are almost no beats and the hooks, such as they are, are drawn out over minutes. However, they both make use of minimalism in their own ways, and I’m powerless to resist either.

♫ Tim Hecker - Boreal Kiss (Part 1)

As I mentioned in my previous post about the redesign, it’s been in various states of non-progress for about three years. I figured it might be fun to talk about how it evolved over the last year (since that’s the only time I actually did anything slightly serious) and finally ended with the Dirty you see today. I always find the evolution of a design interesting and hope that you will too.

Oddly enough, the very first idea I had for a new design had the most similarities with the final product. The colors came from the Cherry Cheesecake theme on Kuler.

Then I wandered off down a rabbit trail lined with spring grass and fresh raspberries. Or something.

After I got bored with that, it was another six months before I tried anything. At that point, did some iterations with brown and blue stripes.

By the third revision, it was starting to get somewhere, but it still wasn’t feeling right. So I took another break. When I revisited the ideas a few months later I promptly dropped the blue and faded the background, moving the design a little closer to the final product.

(I kind of abandoned this one midway through, I think.)

Then I got Super Mario Galaxy and well, that was the end of that. (Because that game? Is made of awesome).

Once I had gotten all 242 stars (yes, that’s 121 as Mario and then the same 121 as Luigi… what can I say? I’m a completionist), I got inspired to make a worn version of the circles logo.

However, Copperplate didn’t feel quite right for the logo, so I started surfing around for distressed fonts that might have the look I wanted. As soon as I discovered Bleeding Cowboys, I knew I had the right font. When I added it to the design, however, it obviously needed some tweaking.

So I did some editing to eliminate the flourish of the second n and differentiate the i’s, v’s, and n’s. The other tweak I made that I think really makes the logo work better was to remove the serif from the a and join it with the n’s flourish.

After that, it was all just implementation.

♫ Goat Explosion - I'm Always Alone

Short and sweet: nanovivid.com user accounts are now re-enabled. However, if you have an existing account, you’ll have to reset your password before you can log in. Let me know if you have any issues.

♫ Underworld - Peach Tree

After a little over five years of using my custom blog engine, I decided that it was time to switch to something else. (Even though it never technically had a name I’ll refer to it as nvJournal for the sake of brevity here). Although I had a lot of fun writing it and adding features over the years, I felt that the time it would take me to extend it further was more than I wanted to spend. So I up and switched to WordPress. I know, right? But it’s working out pretty well so far.

One of the big reasons for switching was so I can use MarsEdit. I was getting really tired of having to write all my posts in the browser and nvJournal didn’t have any sort of API support. Thus, I either had to write an XML-RPC interface or switch to something that did. There was also the lack of support for drafts. With nvJournal it was either published or not (I could publish privately, but then I’d have to dive into the database and manually edit the date when I posted).

nvJournal’s admin interface was also slightly… limited. It worked well enough for writing new posts, but management wasn’t so hot. I only ever got around to listing the twenty most recent posts and then throwing in a box where I could enter the ID of an old post to edit it.

So a couple weeks ago, I grabbed a copy of WordPress, threw up a test domain, and started playing. Obviously the first task was to get my old blog imported. It didn’t take too long to figure out the WordPress export format, so I was able to generate a file for import pretty quickly. I had to tweak a couple of core files to get my post IDs to carry over, but after that, it was smooth sailing.

Then I needed to settle on a design. I’ve been playing with ideas for the post-Whiteroom design since, oh, July of 2005. Nothing ever quite stuck though and I let it stagnate for a couple years. I finally picked things back up last spring, but again, none of the designs felt quite right. Then I tried again in the fall but it was the same story. However, this time, the stars aligned as I hit on the idea of a dirty, worn version of the circles logo that I used in 2003. It’s always been my favorite nanovivid logo by far, so I decided it was time to bring the circles back.

After a lot of pixel pushing, I finally ended up with the design you see here. Of course, I had to go and implement it in HTML, but that surprisingly ended up being fairly easy. There really weren’t too many cross-browser issues to work around this time, largely because the design is much simpler than the last one. And hey, my site is now properly IE7 compatible, so… yay?

Please let me know what you think of the new design. I think the only outstanding issue left is user accounts, and I’ll post once I have that worked out. I’m going to do my best to migrate them over. I hope the redesign and move to WordPress will mean that I will be a bit more likely to blog than in the past couple of years. But we’ll see how that goes.

♫ Basement Jaxx - Same Old Show

• Things Younger Than John McCain
  Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate (oh, and did I forget to mention “war hero”?) John McCain

• Again & Again
  A fan-made music video for "Again & Again" by The Bird & The Bee that uses OS X as its canvas. It's very creative (and apparently it took three months to make).

• Ossom
  Fun little toy that, um, dot-ifies photos.

• BusySync
  The new version of BusySync supports two-way sync between iCal and Google Calendar. Highly recommended.

• TIME FOR SOME STORIES
  Hilarious stories by a Canadian guy named Dave.