#grafikdesignfeed

[codeandcanvas]

Recapping the week

Even today, we spent a few more hours refining our research and information tool we call Grafikdesignfeed (I have written about it here before), to cover some more topics and to improve our custom search queries with filters as well.

On the topic of filters: I usually do not have any blocks in place on any social media website (i.e. usually I do not block people/accounts), but I am under the impression that, should I want to use social media as a research tool in the future (looking for what people do and say about certain topics), then I should start using filters there as well.

Because I want to do that.

Also, I am adding more books I want to read in 2025 from my Bücherregal page on my website to my Goodreads “Want to Read” list as well, which I originally started out doing, but then some ideas for our FreshRSS service came up… you know how it is: it is not procrastination, it’s more like cleaning up after having ceased to be a perfectionist with a really long to-do list: you work through these things so they don’t occupy space in your mind any longer.

Speaking of Goodreads: being the way things are, certain books (mostly ones written in German) can’t be found on Goodreads, so I eventually had to decide to add them there myself. By joining the Goodreads Librarians Group, I can add a book missing from the database myself (a thing I remember having done for the first time some ten years ago now).

So, scrolling down the page on which services are supported for both book data and cover images, I found that the German Deutsche Nationalbibliothek is supported, which is Germany’s national library (everything published in Germany is most likely there), but which in my case led nowhere. So I went with the publisher’s website instead as the source of book data and cover image. Fingers crossed the people at Goodreads accept this contribution (found it on Amazon as well, after looking for it on WorldCat, did not find it by searching for it on Amazon directly, using its ISBN though – odd). You can see my book request here, if you are into that.

From my bookshelf page on my website, I copy and paste the titles into my Zotero, copy the ISBN from there (to make sure I add the right version of the book on Goodreads to my “Want to Read” list; there are versions of books 😖) and drop it into Goodreads.

Ideally, I can move on with the next book right away, but otherwise I need to do the extra step described above.

In the end, there is only one more book left over which I need to add the same way as above. And that book is very special, in a lot of ways (but not special in the way Knauer’s Transformation is: as much as I enjoy ergodic literature, when the ergodism leaves the page and starts to format the book, things get really unusable really quickly), so I will add it after my first request goes through.

Just something to add to my ever-shrinking to-do.

Neat reading list. Looks like I moonlight as a librarian of sorts, as well as moonlighting as a hacker and illustrator.

Now, I am installing Monster Hunter: World, because I crave the exploration and extracting the resources from the world around me.

[codeandcanvas]

You can (re)build a service

Due to the world’s toughest internet laws, running a service which posts the best graphic design articles in Germany is not an easy thing to do.

Things like self‑hosting, reposting on your own domain, and so on are absolutely out of the question, unless you are really keen on testing out the limits of your (legal) budget.

So we slowly started rebuilding our project grafikdesignfeed using freshrss, ifttt, buffer and free socials.

The logic is as follows:

freshrss gathers all kinds of rss‑feeds, we favorite the articles we think are cool, these get sent to IFTTT where an applet takes these favorites, sends them to a buffer account which sends these favorites to (as of now) our account on Bluesky and our account on X (we are working on more socials as well, but that takes time; not work, just time, so we are waiting) and that is the whole machine called grafikdesignfeed.

We are doing this because we want to provide a service to the German‑speaking part of the (not only graphic) design world, and because we really like building useful little machines like this one.

Who knows, maybe you like using our machines as well?

[codeandcanvas]

Applying design to my IFTTT applets

I have been using IFTTT applets for a while and they have become unüberschaubar , that is, hard to take in.

There were just too many, and too much text explaining what each was doing, so I decided to fix that.

First by inventing some kind of boilerplate for the applet names. Then by adding emojis.

And I think that these work better now. I don’t have to actually read them to know which is which. I can look for the symbol, the words Backup, Goodreads, or Loop, and then, after confirming that this might be the right one I need to edit (because I tend to do that), only then will I have to read what they do, and thanks to the boilerplate, I can soon ignore the boilerplate and just scan for the key words.

I hope this will reduce cognitive load. I now know that my backup automations all use the word Backup, that my Goodreads automation each use Goodreads, and that my looping ecosystem, where my own Social Media Content gets either posted on my own website (like songs I have recently liked on Spotify, or what I am watching right now gets logged on Trakt and then sent to my website) or where articles from my website get posted on Social Media get sent out, is called Loops.

I find I keep saying that too often, but a search function is the most important thing when dealing with life (and work) online.

There is also a workaround for posting these posts to my own mastodon instance’s personal account in the pipes, but that will take several vibe codings at ambient temperature to get right.

[codeandcanvas]

I’d rather read Goethe and Schiller

I’d rather read Goethe and Schiller because I am very German, but a few updates are in order.

I have worked with ChatGPT to finally crack programmatically using the Adobe line of software, and so far I have a few successes here and there, to which I will return later in this post.

I put together a small set of scripts on Github, if you are into that.

Then I have spent a lot of time working on my personal website’s layout and display, but that is still very much a work in progress right now, because I just started scratching away at ARIA, and thinking about my website as a useful interface for content. I actually immensely enjoy the serif I use for body text, it is the Cormorant Garamond, by CatharsisFonts, and you can find that here.

I am still doing quite a few adjustments on my website, nudging it closer to the ebook sweet spot. I think you can see the influence Apple Books has had on a few decisions here and there.

There is a dark version in the works, too. I was already experimenting with that.

What else?

The informational bot service called Grafikdesignfeed (on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and on Twitter) has been improved further over the last two weeks: more feed sources, better curation, a lot of huginn intergration and logic wrangling before it all gets sent to buffer to be syndicated to various platforms.

There was a lot of optimization potential there, which I am now glad I figured out. Thanks to ChatGPT again, I was able to work backwords from the results I aimed for and design the fastest and most efficient path to get this project there.

Rebuilt the permalink structures for my website and my social wall as well. worked with solid redirects, so that absolutely nobody gets lost in the translation from structure to structure: I am forcing usablility and accessibility into these online projects as hard as I can, and the new permalinks work because of that, I’d like to think.

Also, there was type experiments going on this week and last week. I was channeling my own graphic design nerd and went to town.

Equipped with ChatGPT, I pulled out BlackInk and built my very first pixel shader brush.

And it is a just so much fun to use it with a pressure sensitive pen!

I even uploaded one demo to my Youtube account, which I never use for anything.

And I put the code for the brush everywhere: on my cara.app account, in the description of the video on Youtube, even put together a page to store these experiments on my website, so that people can always refer back to that, and use these things themselves. For inspiration. For whatever.

Even linked that and the other thing, a small calculator for lines per page, on that page, and on my bento.me

I figured that using that to link to these projects makes sense if I want to post something, say, on Instagram and instead of having the hassle of trying to use links there, I can just say to go to my bento.me and click on the box which matches the post.

Which I did.

Called the page the toolbox, and well, it is. Will need to update it with the next thing. The bento.me page, the other project is already on my toolbox page.

I think I am missing something, but this is my after hours blog: polish is not what I do here.

And this brings me to the final part for today: using ExtendScript to take glyphs from five typefaces I chose for being different from each other, channeled my understanding of David Carson’s print work into it, and went exploring.

Pictures say more than words.

So I did this: put together several versions of an ExtendScript to talk to Illustrator programmatically, to glitch the word “frakt” (which is my server’s name, I have christened him that recently), then I sorted through all these outlines and forms, printed my favorites, and scanned the printouts, glitching the word by moving the scanner, sort of making brush strokes. And then sorted through these scans. Below are my favorites from this fun afternoon spent in flow.

I teased most of these on my instagram stories, because that is how I treat those: as a behind the scenes, teaser type of thing.

See you next time. Man, those are a lot of hashtags. Well, I did say I wanted to be embedded into the culture inside graphic design, so forget about marketing, choom.

That last one is actually a photograph shot with a macro, because look at those subpixel edges !

EDIT: a sh*t, yeah, and I put together a script for WordPress which gathers all links from inside an article upon publish and sends it off to linkwarden to be stored (and also to archive.org via linkwarden, which is way more wiz than what I did).

I now know what I will use Linkwarden for: to be a vault for my actualy links. Fight the link rot, build your own web, live forever.

Rio out