On Dollar Slice and Making Stuff

Over the long, rainy weekend here in NYC, I made DollarSlice.nyc from a variety of materials: pencil & paper, Procreate’s brush tool, Figma for drawing the vector lines, static HTML, some lucky doughy font discoveries, free buoy data from NOAA, 11ty. It’s been a delight to put together, and it’s certainly not finished, but I’m happy with it so far—and with making stuff like this, just in general. The increasing presence of all-things-artificial has spurred an ironic creative period for me. I’ve been drawing with a pencil again—more than ever—and feeling driven to identify aspects of my work and life that I’d actually prefer to keep doing (or sometimes return to doing, if I’m honest) the “long, hard, stupid way” as Frank Chimero said. I guess I never felt quite the same urgency for that when web design was more popularly practiced as a craft itself. But hey, it still can be! I think it’s an important time to deliberately make space those outlets, perhaps for the first time, for some.…