About admataz.com

admataz.com is my personal portfolio website. It's an ongoing project where I experiment with code, design and words. It has been through many different versions and for what it’s worth, there's a site manifesto.

This site is generated by Blockstatic, a minimal and experimental static site build tool I wrote in using node.js.

About Adam Davis

Web Developer, Technical Lead, Technologist

As a graduate environmental and geographical scientist, and now as an experienced software developer, I continue to visualise the world and interactive media as spaces for human interaction. We move through constantly evolving and emergent landscapes that are shaped by relationships between people, culture, location, data and technology. This is my world.

The diversity of people around me inspires me - and having chosen London as my home I am not disappointed. Now as dad to two great smart kids, I love the games, toys, play and adventures we have around town.

Images and Typography

I chose type and colour based on what feels right, and probably spent way too long adjusting margins and spacing and various bits of CSS.

The graphics on this site, apart from project screenshots, are almost entirely code generated.

The graticule background pattern is SVG, generated from code that is part of the awesome D3.js project.

The admataz logo is the longest lasting design element here - I have been using something similar to this logo since about 1999. The type is based on an old Mac Classic font I had called "Game Over". I discovered the scan lines rendered very cleanly at high resolutions, which made it useful to overlay on textured backgrounds and photo imagery, which was all the rage at the time.

I have many times disassembled and reassembled each character in the loga. The version you see above is compiled using JavaScript from an array of binaries like those you see mapping tile games.

So this:

      var admataz = [
      '0000000000011000000000000000000110000000000000000',
      '0000000000011000000000000000000110000000000000000',
      '0111110001111011111100011111011111100111110111111',
      '1100110110011011010110110011000110001100110000110',
      '1100110110011011010110110011000110001100110001100',
      '1101110110011011010110110111000110001101110011000',
      '0110110011111011010110011011000110000110110111111'
    ];

... with some JavaScript, is dutifully rendered as:

Typefaces

The fun typeface for the main navigation is Luckiest Guy by Astigmatic. For regular copy it's Chivo by Omnibus-type .

I chose open source fonts because I wanted to host them myself and not rely on a 3rd party to serve this part of my design.

I continue to tweak the graphics and typography of this site because it's never quite right.