Obligatory Mac Post

20 November 06.

This is Design.

So, I switched to a Mac about four months ago. I haven’t really used much else since. It’s nice, I have to admit. Sometimes you take a step back from the screen and everything just looks and feels so smooth. Like you’re using a future-computer. Like we were promised the future would look. This is worth more than most people would be prepared to admit. I worry I’m spoiling myself. When I find myself back on a PC it doesn’t feel nice; it feels like I’m using something designed by a second year C++ programming student. What will happen during the times in my life I am unable to afford this ridiculously overpriced hunk of plastic?

The problem that has arisen is that text just looks so fucking good on this thing. As a result, I have been designing sites that focus way more on just browser-rendered lettering than I ever did on Windows. This is the thing about the whole cross-platform, cross-browser developing. We always have a slight bias towards whatever platform/browser is our default option. You like to pretend that you don’t, but it’s unavoidable. Do you think that you would bother giving extra spice to Firefox if you were using Internet Explorer all day, every day?

For example, the new portfolio site is all about the text. And it looks so much better in OS X. The text is a little small and grainy in Windows. But I really don’t care. Because I don’t have to look at in in Windows very often. Admit it, this is the way you work too.

Yes, that’s what I look like. My face on the Internet. Mad.

Comments

  1. I love that portfolio page. Looks damn good. Right up my alley. Old-school broadside feel. But then I like this page too… one of the reasons that I took the time to actually read what you were writing in the beginning. Am I a design snob? Yes. But I prefer to think of it as discerning taste. Clean sophisticated text “rules my world, simply rules my world” to paraphrase Prince.

    Welcome to the wonderful world of Mac btw, don’t eva go back homie.

    Seeing your ugly mug there on that page made me feel instantly guilty because it reminded me that I owe you something via meat-mail. Whoops.

    — jaime Morrison  Nov 21, 12:23 AM  #

  2. Thanks Mr. Morrison. Don’t worry about the mailing thing. I’d feel guilty if I thought you were feeling guilty.

    — Pierce  Nov 21, 04:05 PM  #

  3. Welcome the fold. Pierce rawkin the Mac attack. I also love your portfolio site and it looks swank in Safari.

    I design on a Mac, so the first two browsers I do my checks on are Safari and Fireworks. I then switch over to my PC and gaze in frustration checking out the site in IE.

    I’m not so sure that me working on the Mac has changed my design per se, but that may be that I have designed websites on the Mac since OS 8. So I am not a guy who “switched.” My first non-parent purchased computer was an original Powerbook.

    — stb  Nov 22, 04:31 PM  #

  4. I’m pretty grateful really, to have spent so much time developing in Windows first. At this point I program around rendering problems in IE 5.5 and 6 almost without thinking. This is a skill it’s useful to have when you only go back to IE at when the site is more or less done.

    It’s also great to have everything running in parallels on my desktop here, so I can test on everything at once. You can’t do that on a PC yet. Now I just have to get a linux partition going and I’m away.

    — Pierce  Nov 22, 05:59 PM  #

  5. Well, I’ve always had a PC ever since I was 17, but for most of my life as a designer, I’ve done my work on the Mac. I test on the PC.

    When you are making sites for Fortune 500 companies and are working as only three out of 2,000 employees on a Mac at my current day job it’s easy not to delude yourself that it’s still a Windows world and testing your sites on a Mac is a novelty.

    I can’t wait to get Parallels running on my machine.

    — stb  Nov 22, 07:13 PM  #

  6. Wow, I had a very different idea of what you looked like. This new revelation has changed the way I view your writing…unfortunate how that is…

    I’m a Windows user who currently wishes I was working on a Mac. Everything in OS X is definitely geared towards a superior graphical product (GUI, type anti-aliasing).

    — Dylan  Nov 23, 09:37 PM  #

  7. Sorry dude I will try to write more like a 16 year old in future lolz.

    — Pierce  Nov 23, 10:15 PM  #