net - UK (2020-05)

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A couple years ago, I co-founded a creative

digital studio, Fathom, in Sacramento, CA.

Of course, bootstrapping a new firm involves

plenty of stress, but thankfully we’re based in one

of the most productive agricultural valleys in the

US. When not pushing pixels and hacking on

software projects, I need to get away from my

screen and dive into the garden.

I’ve slowly converted my 1/8th of an acre

suburban lot into a food forest. What started as a

single planter box for fresh tomatoes has turned

into a year-round quest to increase food

production of our little land footprint, while

learning about the natural world in a new way and

designing a space that is both calming and

functional. Being surrounded by lush greenery is

always relaxing for a few specific reasons, which

I’ll tell you about here.

The digital world moves super fast, as we all

know. The plant world has a different timescale,

whether it’s a tomato’s journey from seed to stalk

or a fruit tree’s slow growth over years. Working

on an alternative timescale to the normal agency

project cycle is a refreshing exercise in patience.

A garden is a microcosm of life and processes.

It lets me pull back from technical work to explore

and refine a more complex system. For instance, I

got tired of buying bagged or bulk soil, so built my

own compost bin.

The local farmer’s market has loads of great

produce and it’s almost always straight from the

farm to the consumer. But! There is nothing like

plucking a cherry tomato from the vine, still warm

from the sunshine of an early morning and the

burst of flavour that it contains.

When you’re in an office for five days a week,

sometimes it seems like all the days bleed

together. The garden has created a reason for me

to watch the weather, to follow the rain, to think

about the seasons in a new way.

My garden is still a lot of work (though it’s

getting more self-sustainable each year). Even on

weekends when I hope to do nothing useful, I find

myself picking lettuce or repotting a rescued

cactus. It doesn’t feel like work – it’s calming and

constantly bearing edible gifts. And of course, a

little wood-fired cooking with good friends and all

of that wonderful produce never hurt.

FOOD FOREST

Eric Howard tells us how he likes to get away from work by

cultivating his own lush green food forest

BEYOND PIXELS

Eric Howard is co-founder and

chief technologist of Fathom,

a digital creative studio in

Sacramento, CA.

w: http://www.fathom.company

FEED
Beyond pixels

STUFF I LIKE

LISI LINHART

Lecturer and front-end engineer

w: lisilinhart.info

WAVE ACCESSIBILITY

TOOL

WAVE is a nifty tool that

checks the accessibility of a

site. You can install it as a

browser plugin and test any

site with it. It gives you visual

feedback on where your

accessibility might go wrong

and how to fix it.

https://wave.webaim.org

COLOR HUNT

Color Hunt gives you a simple

four-colour palette and you

can also search for palettes

by colour (red, green, blue,

etc). I prefer this colour

palette site because it’s

limited to four colours. The

search via colours enables me

to quickly find colours that

could match my design.

https://colorhunt.co

SVGSUS

Svgsus is an incredibly handy

tool for Mac OS X that enables

users to search through their

locally stored folders of SVG

icons and then quickly copy

and paste whichever ones

they need. This makes the

whole process of inlining

SVG icons into web projects

much easier.

http://www.svgs.us