Do right by yourselves, people. If you need an insightful creative director, an insanely talented designer, and/or a talented, thoughtful developer, hire the hell out of him.

• Let’s say you’re using a WebKit-based browser.
• Let’s also say that you’re mucking around with a little @font-face, along with a few other CSS shinies.
• Now, let’s also also say that you’re mucking around with -webkit-transition, a less-than-standard but still somewhat sexy stylesheet property—specifically, you’re applying a CSS transition to a link when the user hovers over it.

What’s the result? Well, if you’re hovering over the link while your text is being resized, it looks something like this:

So in short, -webkit-transition and @font-face produce a weird, freaky love child visual bug if you’re hovering over a link and resizing your text. The text will temporarily revert to the next non-@font-face font in the stack—Helvetica above—before re-applying the proper typeface.

Which, yes, I realize probably nobody will do. Still, I think it’s kind of an interesting little tic. Plus, it affects all WebKit-based desktop browsers I tested on, notably Safari and Chrome. Remove the @font-face assignment or the -webkit-transition, and the bug goes away.

Granted, it’s no systemic rounding error, but hey: what is?

What movies, music, or TV shows would you bring along?

This is the song that never ends.

On a related note, I’ll be over here sobbing into my stylesheets if anyone needs me.

Dan Cederholm moves over to Wordpress, tweaking his site’s design as he does so. Which is lovely, of course, but not as lovely as this:

If anything, [the new design is] a slight step backward, to the layouts of SimpleBits’ past. Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.

I’ve been thinking the same thing lately: that this whole quasi-tumblelog thing I’ve been playing around with isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As Merlin Mann said: Jesus, I miss paragraphs.

In other words: OMG.

Directed by Chris Tootell, music by Paper Beat Scissors.

Then we got stupid busy. I know, I know—cue the Buscemi. Still, we feel awful about the delay: we only recently found time to sift through everyone’s amazing entries, pick out two winners, and then, finally, blog about it.

(This is the part where we blog about it.)

So. After much, much too much delay, we’re pleased to announce that the two winners of #hcsshaiku have been selected. The judging was rough, people—Dan and I both had lists of a dozen or so favorites, and the debate got heated. It almost came to blows. True story. (Not really.)

Okay, enough with the digressions—you came here for winners. First up is this stellar entry, winning @wilto a free ticket to the Handcrafted CSS workshop:

IE6 lives on.
Box model—and heart—broken.
position: fetal;

Tying for first (and another free ticket), we’ve got @squaregirl’s ode to debugging and BSG. We think.

Curly braces sound cute.
Until you leave one out. Oops!
I fracked my stylesheet.

And there we have it. @wilto and @squaregirl, if you'd be so kind to email info at handcraftedcss dot com, we’ll hook you up with your registration information!

Once again, we’d like to thank Campaign Monitor for sponsoring these two tickets. And of course, thanks so much to everyone who entered—the writing was top, top notch, and Dan and I were both floored by the response. We really hope you’ll consider joining us at the workshop on 14 September. But! We’ve only twenty-ish seats left, and there are only two weeks until the show. So register soon—we’d love to see you there.

Read Jason’s launch announcement when you have a moment, and check out Dan Mall’s write-up as well. Congratulations, all!

So there’s this guy Dan, see, and he decided to write a book. I contributed a chapter. Crippling bias aside, the book we wrote is damned good. (The book we wrote is also very, very pretty.) While writing the book, we thought that planning a workshop to “teach the book” for a day would be fun. So we planned it. We started selling tickets. A lot of them. We got excited. We sold more tickets. We got more excited.

This brings us to present day: tickets for the day-long Handcrafted CSS workshop are selling fast, and Dan and I are in the throes of conference-planning excitement. (That’s a thing. Honest.) Early bird registration closed on Friday, but we’ve also cooked up a little raffle to get a couple more seats filled. So if you want a free ticket to our Handcrafted CSS seminar, here’s the skinny:

1. Log into your Twitter account. (Or, um, get a Twitter account. Because we all need an excuse to shorten our attention spaOH LOOK SOMETHING SHINY IN THE DISTANCE BRB)
2. Write a haiku about web design.
3. Include the #hcsshaiku hashtag in your tweet.

That’s it. Over the next twenty-four hours, we’ll be watching the entries roll in, counting your syllables all the while. The two best haikus will win a free registration in our one-day workshop, courtesy of Campaign Monitor, event sponsors extraordinaire.

So haul out your oversized quill pens and your favorite inkwell, and start draftin’. Hope to see you in September!

(Sōkan would’ve totally wanted to get in on this. Just so you know.)

Making something “free” is obviously an allocation strategy. “Free” attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn’t sustainable, and that brief is underpriced.

We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.

(IOW, TLDR.)

Beautiful collection of stills taken from movie titles, categorized by decade. (Via Rumsey Taylor on Twitter.)

We’ve been planning this for ages, so we’re excited to finally announce “Handcrafted CSS: A Day of Markup & Style,” a one-day workshop presented by Dan Cederholm and yours truly on September 14, 2009 at the Hawthorne Hotel in picturesque Salem, Massachusetts.

For those who register, Dan and I will start the day by handing you a complimentary copy of Handcrafted CSS’s Video Edition (the book plus the DVD). From there, the book’s authors (that’d be Dan and I—hiya!) will spend the day presenting the content over four information-packed sessions, with an in-depth Q&A/discussion session to round out the day. And if you eat food, we’ve got you covered: breakfast, lunch, and the occasional snack break will be catered.

Oh, and did we mention the evening wrap party? Yeah. We have one of those.

We’re thrilled to be able to finally announce the workshop. Doubly so because of its location: The Hawthorne Hotel is located in downtown Salem, roughly sixteen miles from downtown Boston. For those who are mass transit hounds like me, Salem’s MBTA Commuter Rail station is an easy ~25 minute train ride from Boston, and the Hawthorne is a short walk once you’ve arrived.

So if you’ve ever wanted to go to one hell of a book release event in one of New England’s prettier towns, now’s your chance. Early bird registration is currently open at a discounted price of $399 per person, so come on over and sign up! We’ve got 100 seats available, and we’d love to see you in one of them.

Interested in sponsoring the event? Dan or I would love to hear from you. Drop us a line!