Personal

It’s @ChamberMonster’s birthday this weekend and I have a surprise for her. Her guess: “Are you taking me to a cadaver lab?”

Fun fact: 25 years ago today, I met @Metallica. tinnitus.robweychert.com/1994/06/14/met…

Waiting for a train, thinking about how much it sucks that some of my friends are dead.

I expected learning musical notation to be like learning another language, and it is. But unlike learning a phonetic language that uses a familiar alphabet, music’s symbology constitutes its own unique alphabet. And while its symbols can be interpreted vocally, they’re just as likely to be interpreted with an instrument (in my case, a guitar). Rather than an English speaker learning Spanish, the process is more like an English speaker learning Arabic and translating it… See more →

Thanks to Tinnitus Tracker’s many browsing options, there are more than 1,000 lists of shows on the site, making the show list the most prevalent design pattern. It was clear from the start that this would be the case, and the design of event listings is something I’ve given a lot of thought as a designer and music fan, so it was the first thing I explored in early sketches and mockups.

My initial… See more →

Earlier this month I launched Tinnitus Tracker, my last big personal creative project left over from 2018. That frees me up to get down to business on my main creative goal for 2019: making music.

I’m a lifelong music fanatic and always wanted to be able to call myself a musician, but I didn’t get around to really making an effort until about ten years ago, when I started taking guitar lessons. I had to… See more →

👋🏻 I am now in my fourth week of bronchitis.

In the spring of 2015, Last.fm, a social site that tracks users’ music listening habits, gave subscribers a sneak peek at its upcoming redesign. The first thing I noticed was that the Events section, which I had been using for a decade to catalog the shows I went to, was gone. It was reinstated when the redesign was publicly unveiled a few months later, but the temporary evaporation of my data was a good reminder:… See more →

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

Did my last-minute year-end donations. If you’re looking for suggestions, I gave to @ACLU, @GDIGM, @internetarchive, @splcenter, @Wikipedia.

I left Philly 10 years ago today. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

It was really nice to catch up with these dorks today. /cc @hoyboy @jasonsantamaria

My dad would have turned 75 today.

RIP @cindyli. I hadn’t seen her in years, but she was a welcome fixture at many events I remember very fondly. Peace to her family. 💔

FYI
FML

TTYL

Me, waking up and realizing today makes 13 years with @ChamberMonster. 😴😞😑😐🤔😮🙂😀😃😍

My dad has been gone for eight years. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2012/09/g…

I was at a party where I was being honored for some kind of achievement that wasn’t all that much of an achievement. JS said a few nice words about me to those gathered, and when I thanked her afterward, JK appeared and showed me an amazing new project: something to do with a structure that lived in his backyard, whose upside-down mirror image was beamed holographically across the city to his office via direct… See more →

running on empty this morning, yay grief twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Just got ambushed by a master-class-level nightmare about my dead dad, so if any horror writers want a consultation, I’ll be up for awhile.

the bright summer sun caressing my every pore turning me to ash

A couple of years ago, I got a very unexpected email:

I wanted to inquire as to whether you were student at Kutztown University under the tutelage of Dr. Tom Schultz, and if you made an animated film in 1998 under the tile "Twelve Bucks".

Apart from the misspelled name of my professor (it’s actually Schantz), this was correct. But why on earth would someone be contacting me about an old, obscure student film?

The… See more →

Officially ready to learn the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

In my work as a designer, color has never been my strong suit. I often try to avoid dealing with it entirely (as seen in the previous version of my site). Through education and experience, I’ve picked up the basics of color theory and mostly avoided catastrophe, but my rudimentary process has been anything but reliable.

My V6 redesign seemed like a good opportunity to try to improve my color game, since my site is… See more →

Projects

Since 2011, working with A Book Apart was my way of contributing to the design community while my own direction as a designer was uncertain. Over the course of 2016, as my new job at ProPublica restored my enthusiasm for design, I wanted to get back to working on my own projects and sharing what I learned in the process. Making time for that meant something had to give, so after producing the paperback/PDF… See more →

A 10th anniversary air guitar performance. A personal concert diary website. Animations and prints inspired by Sol Lewitt and Steve Reich. twitter.com/anildash/statu…

For 2018, I’m aiming to get out of the habit of waiting for optimal conditions before acting. The water will never be fine. Just jump in.

Actual Christmas conversation I had: “See you at the convent Saturday?” “You mean Thursday?” “No, that’s the other convent.” #clergylife

Neuroses firing on all cylinders. Fun times.

🎶 It’s the mooooost anxiety-ridden tiiiime of the yeeeeeaaarrrrr

Two years at @propublica! twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Once I solidified my V6 redesign’s reason for being and wrestled its content into some semblance of order, it was time to create a system to govern its appearance. The site consists almost entirely of things to read, so typography would be the core of that system. Tasked with satisfying the site’s various functional requirements as well as establishing visual character, it would be a necessarily multifaceted typographic core. So where to begin?

The typographic… See more →

Kicking off Thanksgiving by discovering that the car I reserved weeks ago for today’s festivities was actually reserved for yesterday. 😑

Maybe I’ll spend the night in combing through years of ticket receipts in my email to quantify the experiences my inertia has cost me.

It’s one of those nights where I have tickets to a show but I can’t drag my ass out of the house and I hate myself for it.

Smashmouth once ate at a restaurant where I worked. Holiday season, single mom sever, pregnant with her second child. $100 tip on $80 check. twitter.com/BAKKOOONN/stat…

Dear Mosquito,

I must commend you on a successful campaign of terror, even if its motivations are unclear. What a feast I would have been! A steak the size of a city, unconscious and completely unaware that its tender extremities were under siege by a tiny, carnivorous dive-bomber. And yet, you sacrificed your own self-interest for the sake of unprovoked spite, and landed right on the paragraph I was reading, just as my eyelids were… See more →

TL;DR: Twitter is mostly a platform for me to complain about car alarms. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

I didn’t understand Twitter at first. A service that would constantly update me via SMS about the minutiae of my friends’ activities? Uh, no thanks? Using it via its website was less intrusive and slightly more appealing, but the whole thing still seemed to me like a really disorganized and fairly pointless chat room. Nevertheless, most of my friends in the web design community had joined by late 2006, and the service dominated SXSW Interactive… See more →

Aaaaand we both forgot our anniversary again. 12 years with @ChamberMonster and I’m still dumbfounded by my luck. 💘

Twenty years ago, techno-utopians rightly recognized that the internet in general and the web in particular would democratize the distribution of self-expression in a revolutionary way. Over the next decade, the number of blogs sharing art and recipes and poetry and personal stories grew seemingly exponentially, and their proliferation in the wake of the dot-com crash was a testament to the noncommercial, grassroots nature of the movement. As hand-coded sites gave way to hosted blogging… See more →

In my 20 years of hyper-Catholicism and all the time since, I’ve never been able to make any sense of that “Jesus died for your sins” thing.

The sun and I don’t get along, so seeing it publicly humiliated today is pretty gratifying.

Correlation ≠ causation, but it’s hard to deny the link between my happiness level and how much glow-in-the-dark stuff I own.

7 years in NYC. Every second feels temporary. Every day I add another memory to my inevitable, wistful “leaving NYC” essay. I ❤️ this city.

The worst dreams are the ones that attempt to subsume and dishonor treasured memories of people who are gone.

Trying to suss out the patterns of nights like this, when I’m 100% out of step with everyone around me. An unwelcome return to adolescence.

Me: “Just calling to say I’m sorry you missed it.” Her, both disappointed and giddy: “Did you fall down?!”

Those fleeting milliseconds in which the waking mind comprehends the unfathomably beautiful capabilities of its unconscious counterpart.

Raising kids seems like a lot of work just for the distant possibility that I could make someone else give a shit about my favorite records.