My pick for this month’s book club is The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams.

I’ve noticed that there’s a theme to the books we’ve picked so far for the club: they demystify artistic processes with the goal of making them approachable to a broader audience, deepening the appreciation of things you already enjoy like music, comics and the visual arts.

Each one goes from strategic and inspiring to more tactical and grounded, from Rubin’s near-mystical worship of the sacredness of creativity, to the tour through the history of visual communication by McCloud, to the immediately applicable tips of the Non-Designer book. Williams’ book being the most practical of the bunch makes sense given the business-like purpose of graphic design, but the theme of democratizing creativity is still strong through all of these books.

If the word “Design” with a capital D sounds intimidating to you - don’t be fooled! The basic principles aren’t carved into a stone tablet handed down from on high, it’s simply a way of seeing the world and a skill. And like any other skill, it can be improved with practice and a few starting tips.

It’s such a short read that it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a book. It’s like the skimmable Cliff Notes version instead of a dull textbook. But don’t be fooled - it packs a punch. It’s an impressively succinct distillation of design fundamentals that really helped me at the beginning of my career and still holds up well for anyone looking for an introduction.

It’s exactly the plain-speaking book that I needed back when I was a junior developer fresh out of college. I didn’t have any inkling that I’d become a designer one day, I simply wanted my work to look good. Over the years, I’ve met so many people who reminded me of those early days, people of all backgrounds and roles that aren’t necessarily looking to be designers by trade, but appreciate good layouts and want a few pointers to get there.

If that sounds like you, then this is the book I always recommend as a starting point. It takes the two main principles of graphic design - layout and typography - and distills them down to bite-sized walkthroughs and exercises. They’re much easier to master than you’d think and form the skeleton that everything else hangs on. Color, word choice, usability and all the rest come way later compared to these simple fundamentals.

So give it a spin and let me know how you like it! You can write up a blog post and send me a webmention, hit me up on the socials, or drop me an email, whatever works, and I’ll add links and quotes here.

Also check out the wiki page for the book club for more info or to sign up to host an upcoming month!

Jeremy is repatriating his photos from Instagram, while Tantek is exploring the idea of using Flickr as a CDN, and I’ve been expanding my approach to responsive images to also include RSS feed readers.

Tantek and Jeremy are going to be at IndieWebCamp in Berlin and it starts in just a few hours. I won’t be able to attend all of it remotely because of the time difference, so I’m going to pitch in with a few thoughts in advance.

I thought it would be helpful to take stock of what’s already out there and document common patterns with live examples. Here are the main ways I’ve seen people showcase their pics:

1. Notes
2. Photoessays
3. Albums

Plus a few ways that are less common but very intriguing, like Series and Stories.

Most Common Types

1. Photo notes are posts of a single image. Each picture is timestamped with its own URL.

Here’s some neat examples:

• An evocative view of SF from Mount Tamalpais
• Jeremy documenting a bicycle ride

2. Photo essays are blog posts that have multiple images, alternating between pictures and a textual narrative that weaves it all together.

This is probably the most popular type. Winnie Lim has beautiful examples of photo essays that are travelogues documenting a trip, like this recent one to South Korea.

3. Photo albums are collections of multiple images, typically in a grid format with minimal or no text at the album level, optionally with a caption or more info at the individual photo level.

Naz Hamid recently added a Photos section to his site with a few starter albums, like this cool one of his New York trip.

Less Frequent Techniques

There’s a few other interesting ways to present images that I don’t see around as much but that are great food for thought.

Series:

Series are albums grouped together into a sequential set. Stammy does this at photos.paulstamatiou.com and they’re straight up gorgeous.

Looking at them again now, I can see why the idea stuck in my head. It’s such an obvious yet clever way of showing all the albums while grouping together the related ones.

I love how the series of three albums from his Africa trip not only have their own landing page, but also how the series sits directly below the album for Amsterdam and above the Caymans on the main photos page, all in a natural way that’s easy to distinguish.

So clean. None of the nonsense I usually see in Apple Photos about collections vs albums.

I’m definitely going to steal this idea for grouping together related albums, like when I have ton of photos from a big multi-night bicycling trip. In fact it might also be a great idea for grouping together blog posts of similar topics, like chapters in a book. Very thought-provoking.

Stories:

Stories are slideshows with a mixture of photos and short-form videos, as well as sometimes only text, usually in a vertical format. They can be the temporary kind that disappear after 24 hours or can stay up permanently.

Muan pioneered the concept of showing stories on the web and they have super fun examples on their home page.

What’s nice about this open web version of a story is that each photo or video in the slideshow has their own permalink, like this one of a bottle of maple syrup, which make them so frictionless to share. It’d be nice to also have a permalink for the larger story the photo is in so you could get the context, but it’s easy enough to browse their home page for more examples. And frankly it’s really fun to hop between stories.

Even more impressively, they also created a helpful spec for stories to encourage others to do the same. Joe Crawford used this same spec to create a “reels” section of his site for vertical videos and the related JSON feed.

There’s something really interesting about the format of vertical photos and videos that makes it especially relevant in the mobile era, even if it hasn’t broken out of Instagram jail yet and spread to the open web in large numbers. I tried to emulate a similar treatment by including both photos and vertical videos in my blog post about getting stuck in the mud on a training ride.

The disappearing kind has a bad reputation as engagement bait for addictive behaviors on Instagram and yes, there are real dangers of getting sucked into perfomative behavior that’s damaging for self-worth and mental health.

But I also find that there’s also a freedom to posting things that I know are temporary, one that paradoxically will often create things that are worth keeping. Making stories on Instagram lowers the activation energy for sharing things with friends in way that delays the curation and editing part of my brain. The effect is very similar to how posting a short thought on a microblogging platform is so easy and frictionless that it can seed good ideas for a larger blog post later.

These days I often find myself going through my stories archive to port over images and videos to other platforms for longer term sharing, so maybe I’ll give the stories format a try on my site one day.

Food For Thought

Looking back through this cross-section of sites, it triggered a few questions:

• Can photos live in more than one place?
  • For example, can a single picture be in both an album and a photoessay? Naz’s photo album of NYC links to the article about the same trip, and the article links back to the photo album. It’s like a two-way connection where the album and article are different views of the same photos, one visual, the other narrative.
• Do albums have to be sorted by narrative or chronology?
  • Or maybe they can be organized in other ways that cut across time, such as by topics. E.g. bicycles, landscapes, food, etc.
• If photos live in albums, essays and categories, should a photo’s permalink include links to the different representations?
  • Would it be helpful or distracting to have a slug with multiple links, saying something like: “As seen in this album and this article, under these topics”

This was fun to think about and I’m glad I documented the lay of the land, even if only for my own creative inspiration.

I’m curious to see what comes out of the jam sessions this weekend! Wishing good luck and safe travels to everyone attending this year.

Surprisingly, one of the parts that took the longest to figure out was which kind of front tire to use.

Front tire! That sounds like such a simple project but trust me, there’s a bewildering number of options to research and try out.

I went through three different types in as many years, racking up miles and punctures, riding all kinds of terrain to test the traction (and lack thereof), until I finally found my gamechanger: a bikepacking-specific model from the Japanese company SimWorks.

It strikes a difficult balance - it’s the biggest and knobbiest tire I could fit in my front fork, yet also somehow light and fast on the road.

This tire is awesome, I totally love it. It’s a gamechanger for grip in the corners and my confidence has skyrocketed in loose terrain, especially when carrying a heavy load of camping equipment.

I’m not a thrill-seeking action junkie, I’m a slow and steady type that’s only interested getting as far out in nature as I can, preferably with all of my limbs and gear intact.

But I’ve only been riding in dry conditions so far, which is why I got excited when it rained last week. Now was finally my chance to push my skills out to the extreme in slippery conditions and see where the outer limits really were, while still staying close to home and not in any real danger of getting stranded.

Also: I love the rain. Like to a weird degree. I made a big cup of coffee in the afternoon and just sat there, staring at it like a lunatic, waiting for my wife to come home from work so she could watch our anxious old dog.

So home she came and out I went.

And boy oh boy, that was fun. FUN.

I was grinning from ear-to-ear while getting soaked and charging through puddles. I had to watch it in corners a little bit but that was nothing compared to my old setup. I would’ve spun in circles like Bambi on ice.

It was so capable that I got into a totally different kind of trouble than what I expected. I didn’t crash, instead I was out in the wet slick stuff so much that I hit a patch of “peanut butter mud” and got stopped dead in my tracks.

This nasty stuff is what mountain bikers dread, but totally new to me. I’ve only read about the stuff in recaps of hardcore endurance racing.

Honestly this stuff is so gross. It gums everything up so much that the tires can’t spin at all. It’s a dense mixture of fine-grained soil and wet clay that sticks in giant clumps, growing larger with every rotation until you’re trapped in place like a mastodon in a tar pit.

In fact it was so thick that it popped the belt right off the drive, which almost never happens.

I use a bike with a belt instead of a chain for increased durability in all conditions. It doesn’t need lubing, cleaning or maintenance, and normally it sheds rain and mud off like water off of a duck’s back, but even this amazing piece of tech has its limits. It’s only come off 1-2 times before ever.

This kind of mud is no joke for bikepackers. Run into it in a remote place and boom, game over. You better have a satellite device to call in a rescue.

But let’s not get carried away. I’m not James Franco in 127 Hours. I could’ve walked home if I really had to.

Frankly, I was having way too much fun learning new skills to be grumpy. It being a test run near home made all the difference in my mood and I laughed off the whole thing in disbelief.

So, there was nothing to do but schlep it out. I did what we call a “hike and bike” - I picked the bike up, slung it over a shoulder, and trudged my way off the trail. I found a loading dock by the lake and propped it up on a table for a field repair.

Then it was time to dig in and clean the crap off of it, one disgusting chunk at a time, until things were in good enough working order again.

Finally, it was clean enough to reassemble the belt and wheel setup, then ride home.

I came home with the biggest smile on my face. Honestly that was such a blast that I felt like a little kid splashing in puddles on purpose.

The next day, I proudly took pics of the aftermath.

I love seeing my bike in a filthy state, hinting at the previous night’s adventures. It puts a wry smile on my face, like whenever I see a muddy old Land Rover parked in a monotonous sea of spotless SUVs that have never left the pavement.

I learned a lot on that ride: seeing how the tire held up, practicing control in tricky conditions, and successfully getting out of a literal sticky situation.

I also learned that there are a few more upgrades I need before tackling bad weather in isolated areas, like hydromechanical brakes designed to handle mud like this without fading. The cheapo stock hydraulics failed for the second time this year and I screwed up something in the rear one in particular, so now it’s spongy and borderline useless.

But even without those tweaks, I’m steadily growing in confidence that I can handle some bigger adventures, the kind I’ve been daydreaming about ever since getting into this hobby.

I already had a pretty big ride earlier this year to the local mountains and back, an incredible and demanding experience that I really should sit down and write up.

That was still mostly pavement though. My next big challenge is going to be my biggest off-grid test yet. There’s an event in Laguna Beach in about a month, an epic one where the shortest option is 38 miles of chunky difficult landscape, longer than I’ve ever gone off-road before.

Who knows what the trail conditions will be like in mid-November? It’ll probably be dry enough for some Type 2 fun. Or maybe it’ll get wet and I’ll be hating life in a Type 3 sufferfest.

Either way, I’m down for more adventures and hard lessons. Sometimes the worst ideas make the best stories.

Shelter Island was one of my favorite escapes when we lived nearby on the coast. Great views, nice breeze, and most importantly for us locals, no tourists, bar hoppers or beach crowds.

Luckily it’s just a quick 20 minute drive from our new neighborhood, with no traffic even on a gorgeous Saturday. You gotta love warm weather towns after summer break.

We all needed this. Dudley hasn’t been himself lately and these last few months have been an adjustment to his senior years. We were long overdue for a pick-me-up.

I used to love walking around Shelter Island with Dudley and we hadn’t done it in ages, so it was worth a shot to see if he’d perk up.

And it worked! Maybe he remembered our countless walks, or maybe he just enjoyed the short walk and fresh grass. Either way, it seemed to do the trick. His usual jittery nerves smoothed out and the whole gang settled on a blanket to relax.

When my little guy is happy, I’m happy. The old cliché “happy wife, happy life” is one of my mantras and now I’ve added “happy little dog, happy big dog.”

It’s funny to write a tribute about something as simple as sitting with a calm dog, watching harbor traffic.

This past year since we moved has been a whirlwind. I love the new hood and don’t regret the move. I’ve had a blast exploring new trails on my bike and there’s always at least one monthly group ride to look forward to.

But it’s felt like a hamster wheel at times and I forgot how vital it is to recharge with stillness, not just energy and motion. You have to mix up the usual routines sometimes with something chill and serene. Peaceful even.

I honestly can’t remember the last quiet outing like this, the kind where I remember to bring my small point and shoot camera. It feels fantastic to put the phone away, look up, and be present in the moment.

Boats drifting, a fresh sea breeze, my sweet dog chilling next to us… Yesterday was a nice day, a slow perfect afternoon before the season turns and it’s proper fall weather again.

And a good reminder to take a step back and enjoy the simple things.