Colophon

I'm a Mac/Unix user, and use Emacs and hand coding to produce most of my web pages (although BBEdit has proven more handy on numerous occasions). I use SnapZ Pro to make screenshots; GraphicConverter is my utlity image editor.

The sequence motif logogram was made with weblogo, and I use Adobe Illustrator to create vector drawings, such as the example phylogeny.

Clare's Explanation of a Colophon

Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition provides the following definition for colophon: 1. a notation often placed in a book, at the end, giving facts about its production.

Colophons are seldom seen in modern-day books, but were commonplace in older books, particularly in the era of hand-set type. The colophon was a place for the designer of the book to communicate to others details about how the book was produced. This might include information about the font used, how the illustrations were produced, how the book was bound, how many copies were printed, etc.

I'm making this up, but I believe the colophon fell out of use as books became increasingly mass produced. These details are no longer interesting because books are no longer made "by hand", and there is not much variation in the production details of different books.

There is a parallel between the current state of HTML authoring and early books in that others can reasonably be expected to be curious about how your web pages are produced. There are many different ways to get text and graphics up on the web, some of which require jumping through a particular set of hoops. Did you use a specific web authoring tool? (Did you like it?) If you have graphics, where did they come from, and how did you get them into a format that can be displayed on the web?

Many of us are still at the stage of making our web pages "by hand". Different people have their different favorite methods of creating web pages, and the details are interesting to others who produce web pages. I try to include a colophon in major documents and hope to encourage you to do the same.

Maintained by: Clare Bates Congdon (congdon@bowdoin.edu)