Specifications

A/S/L/etc.

Born in Manila and raised around Los Angeles, I now reside in Washington, D.C., in an apartment with a brick fireplace on the second floor of a converted rowhouse in Capitol Hill.

  • Scorpio, year of the dog
  • Left-handed
  • T. is for Tangco
  • Taxed since 1994
  • INTP
  • Can sleep through anything
  • Not yet dead

I like new genre art.

¿Cuál es éste visual composer?

I developed ‘visual composer’ as my job title to briefly describe my myriad professional interests—‘the printed glyph and the written word,’ design for web and other media, visual fine arts, and creative writing.

All wisdom should be worded so elegantly

“It is a defect of God’s humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

Tom Stoppard

Design Notes

Studies

Content management is powered by WordPress. Monthly lists bear a passing resemblance Jason Kottke’s archives by the grace of this plugin by Alistair Lattimore.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks were roughly categorized and divided into unordered lists. Each of these unordered lists was randomly assigned a class with unique typography and padding properties—those who contributed the unique padding values (four random integers between zero and 35, in any order) were added to the comments of that page’s CSS. There are a total of 32 padding properties and 19 typographical designations for 11 lists—I haven’t calculated exactly how many permutations that yields (a number in the billions), but it was a joy to design, or rather, observe its self-composition when the page is refreshed.

Scripts

Most of the interactive featureset and some of the elegant design cues of this website are due to the innovation of gracious programmers: The list of my recent music listening habits is pulled onto the site through the WP Audioscrobbler plug-in. The accessible compact design of my Contact page email form was constructed by following Aaron Boodman’s labels.js tutorial to the letter.

Typography

HTML-rendered text throughout the site is set in Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, or your browser’s default serif typeface. Graphical text for page titles and the “skyline” logotype are set in Univers Bold Condensed; the “forest” logotype is set in Voluta Script Pro. The CSS font-size baseline is 0.62em on the <body> element.

Cascading Style Sheets

Although the visual design, layout and Cascading Style Sheets here may not be reused without permission, I’ll be the first to advise that reading through well-formed complex CSS documents is an excellent method for learning the trade.

Hardware & Software

This site was mostly coded on November, my AMD Athlon 64 desktop PC running Windows XP. Wasabi, my iBook G4, played a key role in testing and secondary coding when I was away from home. Graphics were put through their paces with the Adobe Creative Suite, most often Photoshop 7 for Windows and CS2 for Mac. For coding, Araneae is my preferred text editor. Bits and bytes were transferred through FileZilla and FireFTP.

Accessibility

I consider §508 a good foundation for crafting accessible websites, but I take extra care to ensure logical reading and link-tab order. Above the guidelines set forth by §508, this site satisfies Priorities 1 and 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Privacy

You are required to provide your email address in order to discuss Studies to ensure that you are a living, breathing human being adding valuable insights and not an automated application trying to sell prescription drugs with poor grammar. That said, rest assured that I will never sell your email address and any spam that appears to be generated by me is certainly not.

Credits

Specifications photo (“Binoculars”) was snapped in Burlington by Shing Khor on the occasion of my visit to Vermont. Contact photo (“Coffee”) was from Labor Day weekend 2005, Flushing, New York.

Copyright

All content is copyright Matthew T. Marcó, 1998–2007, unless otherwise noted.

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Echoes

Data compiled by Audioscrobbler.

+1 562 714 1482
Post Office Box 1333
Downey, California 90240-0333
United States