Projects

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 →

We updated our Cabinet Cards to mark two years of the Trump administration, and it got pretty messy pretty quickly. features.propublica.org/cabinet-cards/…

I often wonder if the laborious passion project I’m working on is a waste of time, but projects like @lynnandtonic’s push me to keep going.

Having just wrapped up another successful Robtober, I’m already thinking ahead to next year. Making a month-long schedule of horror movies is always more work than I think it will be, especially because I aim for most of the movies to be ones I haven’t seen before. As I’ve covered previously, my curation process is fairly involved, but I recently realized I’ve been ignoring a hugely valuable resource.

It’s Letterboxd, dummy

Anyone who’s paid any… See more →

New work: a mother’s annotated journal of what turned out to be a troubling psychiatric clinical trial. features.propublica.org/uic-journal/un…

I’m honored to be mentioned (at 15:03) in @sillypenta’s impressively researched look at 1990s Lego animation: youtu.be/xQtHWlgZEVI

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films, most of which I haven’t seen before. Films, dates, and times (all subject to change) are listed for any friends who want to join me, and ticket links are included for public screenings. The schedule is also available as a handy Google calendar and as a Letterboxd list.

This year, Michael Myers’ imminent return to the big screen has inspired me to binge my way… See more →

What I Did on My Summer Vacation twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Here’s how. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2018/09/r…

Here’s why. cubes-revisited.art/about/

I made something. cubes-revisited.art

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
—Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967

I felt the first rumblings of the obsession a little over a year ago. I’m a big fan of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, and on a pilgrimage to MASS MoCA’s sprawling retrospective exhibition of them, I glimpsed some curious cube structures by LeWitt scattered around the museum. A short while later, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia, I stumbled… See more →

Finally made a quick Windhammer one-pager. Brutalism seems appropriate for the subject. Happy to hear suggestions. windhammer.org

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 →

Anyway, it was pretty fun to unearth and share this stuff 25 years later. Thanks for watching!

I was so excited to see what was possible, and I was determined to master it (and apparently to broadcast my @MST3K fan bonafides).

The early 90s’ nascent digital creative tools were still pretty inaccessible, so Mario Paint felt like nearly legit means of production.

All joking aside, Mario Paint was an important stepping stone for me in the world of digital art and design.

When I keynote Mario Paint conferences, I use this seminal work to outline the fundamentals of the form. (Spot the @alyankovic reference?)

This was the beginning of a long and fruitful career making wildly successful video comic books with Mario Paint.

Good news, everyone: It’s Friday, and the VHS tape of the video comic book I made with Mario Paint in 1993 has been digitized.

Just hangin’ with some microfilm on my day off.

Thank you all for the suggestions! Good stuff. I’m hoping for a future where variable fonts and container queries/units make this easier. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Type nerds: Are there any display faces out there with as many weights/widths as Knockout or Acumin, but available as a self-hosted webfont?

Read about the process behind our design for the Lost Mothers gallery. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2018/03/d…

My brain hurts, but it is a victorious hurt.

Saturday:

1. Partitioning grids
2. Film discussion
3. Back to partitioning grids

For no apparent reason, I used non-Micron pens for the past three years. That shit is over and I am reborn.

Hello! My name is Rob Weychert. I’m an editorial experience designer at ProPublica, which means I work on the overall user experience of the ProPublica site as well as working on custom art direction and layout for some of our big feature stories.

ProPublica is my first newsroom, but I’ve been designing websites for a long time, long enough to have had a good number of perspective-rattling epiphanies about what web design can be. The one… See more →

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 →

My week.

Some @AGWC footage of me is in a @HSpecialSurgery ad, but my @usairguitar buddy Papa Air actually had surgery there! So I updated the ad.

Apparently I was on the teevee last night (around the halfway mark): youtube.com/watch?v=W5GvsW…

Sometimes I want to express CSS animation keyframes in terms of actual frames, so I wrote a Sass function for that. gist.github.com/robweychert/5b…

If you have experience with animation in other media, CSS animation’s percentage-based keyframe syntax can feel pretty alien, especially if you want to be very precise about timing. This Sass function lets you forget about percentages and express keyframes in terms of actual frames:

@function f($frame) {
  @return percentage( $frame / $totalframes )
}

When you create a new @keyframes at-rule, put the following three variables above it (customize the values for $seconds and $framerate but leave $totalframes as-is):

$seconds: 3;
$framerate: 30;
$totalframes: $seconds * $framerate;

Now just invoke the f function… See more →

Meet Column Setter, a Sass tool that helps you build custom responsive grids for float- and flexbox-based layouts, with squeaky-clean code. twitter.com/ProPublica/sta…

Grid systems are fundamental to many visual design processes. They govern the spatial relationships in a layout by establishing a set of standard sizes and positions for various elements. In addition to helping achieve a visual harmony between components, they make the design process faster and more efficient and help ensure decisions aren’t made arbitrarily. If you’re reading this post on ProPublica’s website, you’re looking at a page that was built using one.

Grid systems… See more →

One year into the Trump Administration, we’ve updated our Cabinet Cards to see who’s still standing. propublica.org/article/the-ch…

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…

A nice roundup by @stuntbox of our interactive and visually-oriented work at @propublica this past year. features.propublica.org/2017-year-in-r…

One last bit of 2017 work to share: this troubling story of Mississippi’s systemic failures with mental illness. features.propublica.org/tyler-haire-mi…

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 →

Working on a @jekyllrb site. Archive pages are rendering with category lists that aren’t in the markup and it’s freaking me the fuck out.

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films, most of which I haven’t seen before. Films, dates, and times (all subject to change) are listed for any friends who want to join me, and ticket links are included for public screenings. The schedule is also available as a handy Google calendar and as a Letterboxd list.

Below the schedule you can find a bit about how it’s curated as well as a roundup… See more →

Looking forward to computering with the people of @indiewebcamp in NYC 9/30–10/01! 2017.indieweb.org/nyc

Currently powering through that thing where you launch a new site and kind of wish no one would look at it. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

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 →

We’ve given the @propublica site a facelift. Revised logo, responsive design, new CMS. More improvements to come! propublica.org/nerds/welcome-…