Hi.

13 Apr 2008, 5pm

I'm Dean Allen, a 42-year-old Canadian living in the South of France with my girlfriend and a couple of dogs. I do a lot of different stuff.

Design notes

The current site design was born out of a re-acquaintance of sorts with a style of book design I’ve alternately loved and hated; in particular a grid-based high modernist Swiss approach of the 60s–70s, when thousands of illustrated books were produced using a simple formula: massive, full-bleed, gutter-spanning artwork would sit alongside utterly brutal sans-serif columns of dry academic text. Here’s hoping I’ve tamped down the brutality and dryness, but the spirit is still there.

Production notes

Textism has existed in one form or another since early 2001, at which point the process of publishing it was by current standards rather silly: I'd peck out HTML in the little field-editing boxes in PHPMyAdmin, hit Save and hope nothing blew up. Shortly thereafter, fuelled by nothing more than herbal teas and a Paula Abdul cassette, I started writing code and designing the interface for what would become Textpattern, an open-source content management system that ended up consuming a few years of my life. I no longer contribute to its core development, but am proud of its design, features, and its rather wide influence on other web publishing applications. I still use it all the time.

The pages you’re looking at now aren't served by any one application, however. I’m late to the game, but having now pretty much converted to the MVC way of thinking, I tend to flit between different programming frameworks, preferring to think of data, and its presentation, as the important part, rather than the tools with which one manipulates it.

Lost notes

It’s crap. Utter, arbitrary crap. They make it up as they go along.