About this site

Gorgeous assets

Type

All of the type is set in Skolar, from the amazing, award-winning Rosetta type foundry.

Thoughout my site’s life, I’ve hosted Skolar on Typekit, Fontdeck; but as part of the static site move I converted it all over to self-hosting. I was massively lucky that David Březina – the man behind Skolar – reached out and helped me subset the exact glyphs I need. We reduced the size of the fonts being served down from 750kb+ to ~150kb, whilst maintaining the opentype features that I wanted to serve!

Photography

There are a select number of photos across this site – mainly in the headers in the blog. At the time of writing they're all taken by either myself or one of my family members who have said it’s okay to waive the attribution. If you want to, though, why not check out my dad’s band – Eat the Lemon. Yeah, he’s more rock an roll than both you and me…

The build

Processes

The site is built with Middleman – a static site generator written in Ruby. Moving to a static site was a big jump, but with my site having a small footprint and the customisation available, it was a no-brainer.

Repo

All of the code for this site is available on Github.

Plugins

Various plugins are sampled or bastardised throughout the site, mainly to allow a jQuery-free site, but the only two that are injected unchanged are Baseline.js and OnScreen.

Thanks

Lots of people have helped me out throughout my site, whether that be through development, testing, or just being supportive of what I do cough mum and dad cough. Here are just a few:

• The University of Reading Typo lecturers for helping me realise just how important considered typography is.
• Marc Thomas (and more recent members of the Fueled team), for putting up with my endless Ruby questions, and helping me push my limits in my role at Fueled that made this site possible;
• David Březina for putting in so much extra legwork to help serve Skolar in all its glory with the smallest font-size possible!

There are definitely more people that need thanking, and this list will grow as I remember them. I promise!

The small print

Take what you want

This is the internet after all, and the entire site is hosted on a public repo. Got a question about something or how it works, or want to know how to do it yourself? Don’t hesitate to ask. I’d only ask that if you're going to use any of my photos or images that you just check with me first – chances are it’ll be a big yes!

Cookies

I use a select few cookies on my site, the majority of which are to provide analytics so I can improve my site for the people who are actually accessing it. By all means block the cookies, but if you haven’t then thanks for being awesome!