“I used to always think that I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.”
– Daniel from Microserfs
About The Author
My name is Scott Vandehey, and I’m a CSS Ninja at Pop Art. I’m 30 years old, and I live in sunny Portland, Oregon with my wife, Annie, and our daughter, Zoe. I spend my spare time watching movies with friends, reading sci-fi novels or comics, playing video games, and working on this site. I am probably not a Cylon.
If my life was a game of Jeopardy! My seven dream categories would be:
- Web standards and CSS
- Comic books
- Blues Brothers trivia
- Science fiction
- Video games
- Downtempo music
- Potent Potables
In the past I have worked as a retail salesmonkey, a camp counselor, a radio DJ, a graphic artist, and a web developer. I have traveled to New York, Indianapolis, British Columbia, and Sapporo, Japan. I have produced a webcomic, helped to produce a video game, and had my artwork published in the New York Times.
In the future I want to travel to New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, and Holland. I would like to produce a movie with my brother, have more of my work published, become better-known in the web community, and own a bear suit.
About The Site
Web development is a large part of my life. I’ve been active online and had some sort of website since 1996. I taught myself HTML with the tutorials on webmonkey.com. At first I coded by hand since early websites were so simple. Then, in the Creating Killer Websites era of table-based-layouts and single-pixel-gifs, I continued to code by hand because it was a source of pride. Now, in the Zeldman/Meyer age of web standards, I live and breathe CSS. I code by hand because anything else adds an unnecessary level of abstraction between myself and the source. (see my Manifesto of a Web Producer)
This website started with Miles Johnson and I registering a domain name combining two of our favorite things. Ninjas. From Space. At various times, this domain has hosted personal sites, design sites, galleries, webcomics and experiments. It has always hosted my personal site, and that’s what’s taken over now. I don’t have any over-arching theme for the site, other than just writing about what’s important to me, and I do that on a nearly daily basis. (see the complete history of spaceninja)
About The Design
The current design was created as part of a larger effort to unify and simplify all my online projects under one “roof.” It may change and grow over time, but I hope that the core is here to stay for awhile. Under all the polish, there’s a site that validates as strict XHTML, and separates content from presentation. Except for images that are part of the content, all the design and design imagery are done through the CSS. The fancy navigation at the top degrades into a nice list, and there are hidden structures that make the page easy to use in old browsers that I’m hiding the stylesheet from. My whole goal is that any future redesigns can happen entirely within the stylesheet, with no need to recode any XHTML.
As for the actual design, it’s called Motorcycle Hero. It intentionally pushes me away from the designs I’ve done in the past. I wanted to avoid the cramped, dull, monochromatic look. I wanted color and large type and lots of room to breathe. Anywhere I thought there was enough whitespace, I added a bit more. Anytime I thought the color was about right, I cranked it up a bit. And the whole time I was working on the design, I had a placeholder image to indicate where I would put the “real” header image. The placeholder was a slice of an illustration of a motorcycle by Dangeruss. After a few days of looking at it, I couldn’t imagine not using it, and Russ was kind enough to give me permission to use it.
I'm a 30-year-old 
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