Projects

Editorial design is a many-splendored thing. Cliché as it may be to say a picture is worth a thousand words, there’s no denying that even the most skillful and vivid deployment of the written word can benefit from a thoughtful visual presentation. Photography, illustration and video can humanize a story’s characters. Charts, graphs and other data visualizations clarify complicated concepts. Typography and color set an emotional tone. And bringing cohesive form to it all is… See more →

Let me begin by saying I promise this post is mostly good vibes. Skip ahead if you like, but if you’ll momentarily indulge my pessimism: What a stupid time to be alive.

2021 was supposed to be the year the vaccine gave us our lives back, and while it did for some of us to some degree, its international distribution predictably favored wealthy nations, and the long-simmering anti-vax movement here in the wealthiest nation of… See more →

This time around, I decided to overthink isometric projection.

The fourth issue of Plus Equals, my algorithmic art zine, is out now! plusequals.art/04/

In addition to what I’ve learned over the years from so many others, ideas and skills these generous folks shared online had a direct impact on this project: @davidwalshblog, @vika_grabowska, @ebensorkin, @jonpinhorn_type, @j98, @trysmudford, @desandro

twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Robtober is what I call the horror movie binge I do every October. After I redesigned my site in 2017, I started documenting the event each year with a horrifically custom-designed blog post, getting a little more elaborate each time. This post goes behind the scenes of the 2021 edition.

The data

I generate my site with Jekyll, and a custom-designed post like Robtober gets its own unique layout file. To keep things tidy, all the… See more →

Love this handy bookmarklet from @jenko that makes it easier for folks in the UK to watch Robtober movies! 🙌🏻📼🙌🏻 twitter.com/jenko/status/1…

Many years ago, my bff @jasonsantamaria spookified his site design every October. It was a revelation, the web design equivalent of a Halloween costume. I’m proud to keep the fun tradition alive. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me.

This year’s batch is a little less focused than usual, drawn from new releases, repertory screenings in Philadelphia, recent additions to Time Out’s “100 Best Horror Films,” Criterion… See more →

Chase away the Monday blues with 425 compatible seamless patterns! 💫 twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Here’s all 425 tiles hanging out together in one image.

This issue creates a set of 425 tiles, any of which can seamlessly border any other on any side.

The third issue of Plus Equals, my algorithmic art zine, is out now! plusequals.art/03/

“vacation”

Its set of 720 combinatorially generated images is also meant to offer an opportunity for reflection on a turbulent moment in a turbulent national history.

This issue is a crash course in photography, print production, and digital imaging, and its art indulges my affection for halftones.

The second issue of Plus Equals, my algorithmic art zine, is out now! plusequals.art/02/

I’m not a math or programming whiz, so my hope for this project is that by demystifying algorithmic art for myself, I can demystify it for others too. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

The first issue creates dozens of images from different stacking orders of a series of striped cards with geometric shapes cut out of them. plusequals.art/01/

Hey, I started a new art zine! plusequals.art

These were part of the path that led me here: cubes-revisited.art

I’m not close to that level, but I’ll pull a thread with a few of my dalliances in the genre.

Apropos of nothing, I decided that the first of the old entries I’d bring over to V7 would be granular ones:

• Daily Haiku: A section of the fourth version of my site, beginning back in 2005. As the name suggests, I wrote a haiku every weekday based on the Dictionary.com Word of the Day. Each haiku was originally its own entry, but when I brought them over to V6 a few years ago, I consolidated… See more →

I began last year’s “That Was 2019” post by expressing disappointment in my immune system’s poor performance that year, so let me begin this year’s wrap-up by praising that same immune system’s effectiveness in 2020. More than 1.8 million people died of COVID-19 in 2020, a disproportionately high 340,000 of them Americans, and I didn’t get so much as a head cold. I spent much of the year being grateful for my health and financial… See more →

Apparently this is what happens when I am @hjchams’s Secret Santa. 🤫🎅🏻

Merry Christmas!

New old work: I redesigned our Cabinet Cards a bit for the incoming administration. features.propublica.org/cabinet-cards-…

For awhile, I had basically resigned myself to the idea that the massive amount of stray content I’m planning to bring home (thousands of tweets, Flickr photos, etc) would necessitate moving my site onto a LAMP stack CMS. I started poking around in WordPress, which I hadn’t touched in years, and Craft, which I use regularly in my work at ProPublica. The former felt bloated and the latter’s setup presumed a level of back-end know-how… See more →

And when you benefit from someone else’s shared knowledge, let them know! It will probably mean a lot to them. I know it does to me.

Your knowledge is more valuable than you think it is! Share what you know by documenting it and finding opportunities to mentor and teach.

This project from James Stanley generates seasonal CSS color schemes for every day of the year: seasonal-css.incoherency.co.uk

This @kevinkirchner app lets you generate color palettes from scratch or from images, with precise control over contrast ratios: grayscale.design

Recently I’ve heard from some folks who read my blog posts and incorporated some of my projects’ ideas into cool projects of their own.

When I learn something new, I tend to assume everyone else already knows it. But I try to share my discoveries anyway.

In case you missed this over the weekend and could use a little distraction today. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Every October, I make a schedule of dozens of horror films, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. I call it Robtober, only half-ashamedly. It’s fun! For the past few years, I’ve announced the schedule’s contents via blog posts with increasingly elaborate designs, effectively dressing my site up for Halloween. This year, I wanted to harness some of my favorite visual themes from horror movie marketing (such as posters and trailers), and distorted hand-lettering… See more →

The terrifying title lettering is a handmade @jenmussari special. I’ll share details soon about the super fun process of working with her. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

It doesn’t look like it, but this is a blog post! Personal sites are fun and I wish everyone had one. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. It’s usually a mix of home viewings and public theatrical screenings, and the schedule is published both for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me. This year, sadly, the pandemic will keep me out of theaters, and guests won’t be able to join me for home viewings. But… See more →

My site’s loud background color on large viewports never felt right, and I just realized another color in my system works much better. 👍🏻

The year is 2020. Summer is giving way to autumn. COVID-19 will have killed a million people by the year’s end, a fifth of them Americans. Unemployment is soaring. Millions have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and its disproportionate effect on Black people. The west coast is engulfed in the fiercest wildfires it’s ever seen. The sky is orange.

In the face of all this, the President of the United States denies… See more →

How did you know, cuz I never told. #quarantunes

As you may know, this song hails from Minnesota, which is no coincidence, because today is MN native @meganborn’s birthday! Let’s celebrate by listening to the Jets and gazing at enormous butter sculptures. 🎂✈️🧈

Easing back into my site redesign and thinking about individualism and collectivism in the context of making the web. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/06/v…

I might have expected quarantine life to be a boon to my site’s redesign process since most of my preferred social distractions were nullified. Instead, I’ve been using the time in isolation to make music videos, finalize a home purchase, move into said home, and try to find my place in our national reckoning on racism and public safety reform. But as I slowly shift some of my attention back to the redesign, I’ve been… See more →

Added documentation to the tinnitus.robweychert.com repo because by the time there’s live music again, I may have forgotten how to update the site. 😞

I left New York yesterday. A few days from now, @chambermonster and I will officially be homeowners in Philly. My stuff is staying in Brooklyn until I go back for it in a few weeks, but it’s all packed up and ready to go. Needless to say, I never expected the final few months of my decade in that impossibly vibrant city to be spent under house arrest. This @wussy_official song had a new resonance… See more →