About » Colophon

Gilles Vandenoostende

Hi, I'm Gilles Vandenoostende - designer, illustrator and digital busybody with a love of language, based in Ghent, Belgium.

Colophon

This website was conceived with pen and paper, sketched out in Adobe Photoshop and lovingly hand-coded with Coda on a Mac. I used Versions and Subversion to keep my code safe and versioned, and Things to keep myself organized and on-task.

I chose Skolar for almost all text you read here, except for the links in the top-navigation, which use League Gothic. Both fonts are served by Typekit.
I used some patterns courtesy of Subtle Patterns.

The site itself is hosted on MediaTemple.

Technology

I used several technologies, open-source tools, libraries and frameworks in the development of this site.

  • All markup should be valid HTML5, design and layout is in CSS3 and a dash of Javascript to lubricate the entire process in a progressively enhanced way.
  • LESS was used to compile the final CSS.
  • A highly customized version of Limonade-PHP to run the hand-coded[1] parts of the site.
  • The blog is powered by WordPress.
  • My art/creative repository is powered by Tumblr.

Javascript Libraries

Here are the Javascript libraries I used:

  • jQuery - almost universally present in every web-project I initiate.
  • Modernizr 2 - for feature detection and parallel loading.
  • Flexslider - a nice responsive (and touch-optimized) jQuery slideshow plugin
  • Selectivzr - to force IE to play nice with some of the more advanced CSS selectors.

CSS Libraries

  • LESS Elements - a useful collection of CSS3 mix-ins for LESS CSS.

[1] - All parts of the site, not powered by Wordpress or Tumblr are hand-coded. Limonade-PHP is used mostly for its ability to route clean URLs to files, which means the about page is accessible under http://www.vandenoostende.com/about/ instead of under http://www.vandenoostende.com/about.php, which is just ugly.