Joe Dynamite

I don’t consider myself a designer by any stretch, but I wanted to have a place to document some of the choices I’ve made with regard to this website’s look and feel. Not sure how often I’ll update it, but I might add something every so often.

Inspiration

I’ve been a fan of the cover art for Wale’s Hate Is The New Love mixtape ever since the first time I saw it. The grayscale photograph in the background and the colors of DC’s Metro map overlaid in the foreground play against each other nicely. I’ve wanted to emulate something like this in a website’s design for a long time.

Colors

Instead of going with the same colors from the mixtape, I decided to look a little closer to home. Since I’m not from DC, I think I pulled my colors from an NYC subway map I found somewhere on the web, though it’s been so long I hardly remember. They’re a bit brighter, which I like, and I got the names from some online color name matcher. It’s kind of fitting that two of the names wound up being locations in Pokémon’s Kanto region.

For the gray scale, I chose a pretty basic range. I think I found it as part of the default palette in a design program I was using at the time.

Fonts

As a developer, I have been using Input Mono in my text editors and terminals for years. When I saw that DJR released its companion, Output Sans, I knew I had to use it for my next website. Nearly all the text across this website is set in Output Sans with few exceptions. It wasn’t available from any font services so I had to buy a license and host it myself.

For embedded code samples, the font switches over to the aforementioned Input Mono. It is also used on specific elements that are meant to look like video game text. This font on the other hand was available from Adobe Fonts.

Icons

Years ago, I bought all four Pictos icon packs from Drew Wilson, which I guess are now considered Pictos Classic. I still find myself using them in projects from time to time and this website is no different.

Software

Due to its simple aesthetic, most of this site was designed in code, right in the browser. But I will jump into Sketch here and there to work through an idea or concept.

If there is anything else you want to know about, feel free to get in touch with me. I’m happy to answer any reasonable questions.

More interested in bytes than pixels? I have a page about the technology too.