Welcome to Socialuxe

Ever since I’ve been in Silicon Valley, I’ve found myself woefully maladapted. The complete change in culture, climate, geography and my forced redefinition of what it is that I was to now consider home never sat well in my heart, and I found myself in some type of inexplicable identity crisis, an outsider in a circle, oddly in a place where I found I had more in common with people than not.

As I moved and struggled to figure out my role in the greater “real world” community, hyalineskies, my baby throughout most of college and the voice that got me my jobs at Organic and Facebook, began to suffer from an æsthetic and narrative schizophrenia. My once fully-sure voice wavered between an ode to luxury æsthetics in one month to a complete ridicule of the superficiality some later. As I ported the hyalineskies database to this new domain, I considered deleting these false starts; instead, I have decided to keep tham as a marque of my troubles as I struggled to become relevant in a new world.

Instead of relevance, hyalineskies became increasingly irrelevant. My code and writing wasted away under a layer of dust. Around 400 days or so ago now, I wrote my last hyalineskies post ridiculing the cultural insensitivity of a suburban demographic toward urban music. Some time in 2008, my beloved hyalineskies dropped into its persistent vegetative state, and this past autumn I decided it was finally time to say goodbye to my five-year-old. No resuscitation would be able to restart it.

From hyalineskies to socialuxe

hyalineskies was never really a domain I wanted to start a publication at; it was more a child of convenience than of deliberation. I had kept a public diary on the domain throughout high school and freshman year of college, and the domain was there and ready when I decided I wanted to use it as my personal voice on design, development and technology. It wasn’t until 2006 when I really realised how much I loved interaction design, and hyalineskies prospered as a member of the now-also-irrelevant 9rules Network. (Yeah, remember that?) I was so excited, I even invited over a bunch of college friends that watched me work away at the blog and threw a party in the classiest way I could on my means. I loved it.

When I decided to reboot, I needed to find something that I felt better matched my personality, even at the expense of it not really “fitting” my content aesthetically. It still seems odd to me to build your content around a brand and then try to act your brand. In the end, you’re still being insincere, and in a world where reputation, image and trust are everything, it seems you’d be better off building your content around your own personal brand and who you really are. I am still a curious boy obsessed with fashion models and luxury aesthetics. I still put the 6-series into nearly every mock I make at work. I still listen to all sorts of music, love academic research, study German and hack away on my MySpace profiles. I still shoot firearms all the time. I still tune Hondas. I still prefer drinking Hennessy and Sapphire. While I think I’ve certainly become jaded by a lot of Silicon Valley’s echo chamber, I haven’t really changed much. I’ve just realised how much I really like the stuff I do, and I will simply have to see where that takes me.

I decided to take a portmanteau of the two things I find myself always orbiting around: social media and social networking, which I am still convinced has made the largest impact on Western culture ever — props to you, Zuck, as well as everyone I’ve worked with at Facebook — and my perpetual love of luxury æsthetics. A quick whois search later and socialuxe was born. Another night and I’d crafted a logotype from House Industries’ Chalet. Another night, with my (ex) girlfriend asleep and Sia on the headphones, I found myself staying up nearly all night building the index page of the design you now see. Something new was beginning.

From Facebook to the greater world

The changes continued. I left my ultra-stable, crazy job at Facebook to go indie with a small startup, much to the shock of many of the people I worked with. I’ve had many people tell me that I’ve made a poor decision, but even today I am convinced that my departure from Facebook was the best decision I have made since I moved to San Francisco. As much as I love Facebook and everything it stands for, I found that for many reasons I had locked myself into an atmosphere where I didn’t feel I was maturing, both as a designer or as a person. I certainly honed my skills as an engineer there, but I had to make the personal decision to see more of the industry. I wasn’t going to really see that in a large company, and maybe one day my passion will lead me back to Facebook. I knew, however, that I needed to learn some hard lessons about corporate politics, decision-making and overall “experience”-related things before I could really make a difference from within an organisation like Facebook, and with that in mind, off I went. I’m now in the ultra-risky position of playing with startups as the Design Director at iList, but the risk and the crises I have to deal with there have made me a far stronger and more professional person. I am sure that will continue long into the future.

From structure to poststructuralism

I’ve long been a proponent of using the grid, ever since I basically found I had a massive man-crush on Khoi Vinh and his port of typographic grids to the Web. It made much sense to my modernist-loving mind, but I’ve never progressed by falling back on the rules that I know work creatively. When I went into the development of Socialuxe, I threw aside my usual tools and went to work on something completely different, simply estimating the proportion, size and colour of everything to get to where I wanted to go. In some ways, I feel I regressed creatively in the exercise: Socialuxe no longer felt meticulously planned. At the same time, it opened a new creative door and the freedom from the rules I had set for myself felt, well, liberating.

I played with interesting takes on my generally modernist toolkit. Instead of using classic typefaces like Helvetica or Avenir, both of which I have used in previous iterations of hyalineskies, I went for different variants of Chalet, which you see in one of its lighter variants in this title and in a heavier one for the feature post. If I could somehow get away with using a different typeface for body copy on the Web, I’d probably do that, too. For now, I’m stuck with Helvetica there. Oh, and those subheadings? Set in Hoefler+Frere-Jones’s beautiful Gotham, a face I’ve wanted to use in a project since 2007 but could never really find the right one.

In my opinion, the end result is surprisingly unified. I’ve also realised how much I feel I am getting close to perfecting the blog IA for my sites; there is very little in the architecture of Socialuxe that I did not do in 2006 with hyalineskies 7 “ærial.” The theme does currently have its shortcomings, such as no way to search or get to the archives, although this was a deliberate decision made when I first began the design of this (as a magazine-like format, I wanted to place extreme emphasis upon the current content as opposed to existing content.) I’m sure that will change as I evolve this and realise what is working and what isn’t. Design is very much an evolutionary process. I am confident that what currently exists will be fit enough at present.

From me to the community

Most importantly, Socialuxe is my gift to the community again. It’s not only a place where I can express my own voice on matters of social media, culture and consumerism; it’s a place where I can also write code, experiment and improve as both a designer and engineer. That’s why I’ve extrapolated my old “WordPress” section into Socialuxe Labs, where I’ve not only posted my past WordPress work but also the Mélange Lifestream Engine that powers estonbond.com. To further base my code around the community, I’ve hosted the direct, in-progress source on GitHub for you to fork and modify at will. I actively want people to learn and branch these codebases into things that work well for their own projects. That’s why I release them in the first place.

The content does not end here on the main site; I have also created (and have been regularly posting to!) Socialuxe &c, my Tumblr-based blog of pretty things and interesting links. I’ve always things to put here, so if my written posting frequency appears a little low, I’ll still be there and on Twitter.

Enough of my verbosity at this point. Welcome to Socialuxe. Enjoy your stay and grab the new RSS feed. There are still a few bugs here and there that I’m working out; feel free to report any that you may see. I can safely say that — finally — my role has been reborn.

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