Elyrium Noire

I came across this resource when researching mobile typography. I found first this great article on Typekit about Fallback fonts on mobile devises. Then I was onto Tinytype.

I am slowly migrating all native legacy CSS from a high traffic website and it's counterpart web application into LESS. Normally, I work out of an environment that has all the goodies already available: Git, Node, Lessc. But today I have the need to also have it on my local machine, as everything I do now is in LESS and Git, even small stand alone landing pages. Can't live without them.

So I've decided to install lessc on my machine at work. We have Windows machines to the dismay of 90% of my web developer peeps, and we are behind a proxy too, and my user password changes every three months.

Installing Node.js was easy, it also installed NPM. Now to LESSC!

Because of the proxy server, this:

$ npm install -g less

will return an error for the proxy. So what to do??

Also, because my password changes every month, setting an environment variable, for me, was too frustrating. I discovered there's a way to pass the proxy info only whenever you need, which worked for me.

In the shell type the following:

 npm --proxy http://user:[email protected]:port# install -g less

But hey, my password has an @ signs and is throwing errors! This is because the ' @ ' sign indicates which host you want to connect to, it will take whatever text after the @ as part of you host name. So what to do, eh? This article explains that special characters need to be encoded in hex. So @ = %40, or ! = %21. For more character entities and hex codes see this page.

Knowing that @ is %40 in hex, let's try this again:

$ npm --proxy http://user:p%[email protected]:port# install -g less

Now the LESS installation command should work.

For further LESSC installation behind a proxy using windows command prompt, try these articles:

http://superuser.com/questions/347476/how-to-install-npm-behind-authentication-proxy-on-windows

and:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11718952/using-lessc-on-windows

Compiled list of 61 style guides from known brands around the globe.

If asked what Wabi Sabi is, a lot of Japanese will not be able to explain it in words; if asked to a westener, they’d say it is a Japanese aesthetic. Wabi Sabi goes beyond a cultural aesthetic, and the book provides simple and concise examples, written and pictures, so the reader can get “a feel” of what wabi sabi is. 

  The book has 88 pages with large type (dark-medium brown, so the contrast isn’t too harsh). The paper is of a medium heavy matte stock. Its has an image on every other page almost, to a total of 15 photos of Wabi Sabi examples. There are also about 25 footnotes.   The author sets out with a generic overview and history of wabi sabi, then it compares Wabi Sabi to Modernism, listing its similarities and differences, and then it lists five characteristics of wabi sabi (behavior, state of mind, metaphysical, ) and he explains each with photo and written examples. Although the book talks primarily about the wabi sabi tea master Ryuko and his achievements in tea ceremonies, all the comparisons show the principals of wabi sabi. It is up to the Designer, Photographer, Poet, to “feel” it and apply to their own work.   The book isn’t for everyone, especially in a western world where flawless and new things are what defines beauty; wabi sabi is more about the opposite: loneliness, humility, the sad natural beauty of things that are impermanent. Some will find the book ephemeral and vague, others enlightening. I think that, although short, the book is a great introduction into wabi sabi.