A repository of half-formed ideas and interesting finds for Nick Trombley, a web designer based in Boston.

All pages contained here are currently and forever will be works in progress. Any appearance of completion or finality is purely incidental and should be disregarded.

View the source for this (and other projects) on GitHub.

colophon

The Innocent I is built with Eleventy and deployed via Netlify. Most blog posts are composed in markdown with iA Writer before releasing to the wild.

The original design was done in Adobe XD over an afternoon at Connel Coffee in Tokyo. It was heavily influenced by the style of a book I was reading at the time, Smiljan Radić's Every So Often A Talking Dog Appears, overlaid with the Whitelines gridded notebooks I have used religiously for many years. All horizontal and vertical elements of the site conform to the strict 12px square background grid, which constrains much of the site's design.

innocence

The title of this site comes from John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing.

The perception of solid form is entirely a matter of experience. We see nothing but flat colors; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the dark side of a solid substance... The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.

As Ruskin says, one has to strive, if one is to see with the Innocent Eye.