Mike Essl’s Blog

I am Mike Essl, a Graphic Designer living in Brooklyn, NY. I was one of two original founders of the design firm The Chopping Block. I no longer work there and have since moved on to teach at The Cooper Union. I also do stuff for The Smoking Gun and a handful of other clients. I will save the rest of the corporate stuff for when I launch my pro site.

I am originally from a suburb of Philly. So yes, I love soft pretzels Tastykakes, Goldenberg Peanut Chews, hoagies, and Cheese Steaks (with Whiz). I call Italian Ice, Water Ice, and I believe with all my heart the movie Rocky is unfadable.

And on a final note, I have what could be the largest collection of Mr. T memorabilia in the world, second only to a good friend of mine. If you have any Mr. T stuff and want to sell it, I am your man. One day soon I will launch a site of my collection.

I have no idea how the content of the site is going to shape up. Some ranting, some tech stuff, and some design stuff will accompany your typical blog fare. Comments will be on for most entries so feel free to tell me how I am doing.

This site is XHTML strict 1.0 and uses CSS to do the layout. I use only one table on the site, for TABULAR data, and there are no image tags used in the design (only in the content). If you are looking at this site in Netscape 4.x or a beta/old browser the site will look like raw text, that is intentional. If you see the site as an unformatted body of black text with blue links, it means you should update your browser.

I coded the site entirely by hand in BBEdit, I don’t hang out with any of the WYSIWYG apps out there. I rocked the entire thing on 2 Macs, a dual gigahertz quicksilver with 1.5 gigs of ram and a cinema display, and a new 12 inch G4 powerbook (yes I am bragging). I don’t hang out with PC’s either.

The site is powered by pMachine Pro. I can not say enough good things about this piece of software. Check it out and tell Rick I sent ya. The Rockin’ section is powered by Kung-Tunes and Apple’s iTunes.