Posts Tagged ‘pretty’

After spending three months in a cast earlier this year, I have man­aged to suc­cess­fully break my other wrist now. (Appar­ently my bones are made of egg­shell.) I’m still in the early stages, so typing is a chal­lenge, and I’ve had all kinds of emails and busi­ness to attend to. Accord­ingly, I’m taking the easy way out this week, and sharing some inter­esting, mostly design-related, items from my Google Reader.

Pretty and/or inter­esting things

Jewel House Col­lec­tion: Gor­geous pat­tern, and it res­on­ates nicely with my new infatu­ation with Eng­lish royals around the time when they liked chop­ping heads off willy-nilly.

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang: The font’s a bit over­used and inel­egant, but the titles are oth­er­wise rather charming and lovely.

Stun­ning NYC Subway Sta­tion Hidden From Plain Sight, Until Now: My love for subway sys­tems knows no bounds. I thought Grand Central was NYC’s piece de transit res­ist­ance!

Infographic of the Day: What the Bible Got Wrong: The short answer is “everything”.

Inside Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Unmake­able” Inter­active Book: Remember real books?

Sixty-two Reasons Why “Gami­fic­a­tion” Is Played Out: More argu­ments against FourSquare!

How to Bribe Police in For­eign Coun­tries: Some­thing I’ve always been curious about, and will almost invari­ably at some point need to know.

Noc­turnalis / Dur­inalis: More gor­geous wine packaging.

Turns out, it *is* a river in Egypt: Utterly gor­geous view of Africa from space.

In Real Hot Sauce Now: I need to find this girl and marry her.

Design

Gender Dis­par­ities in the Design Field: I wasn’t actu­ally aware there were any, although it becomes rather obvious the more technically-inclined you are. Is it Lady Ada Lovelace day yet?

Equal Height Column Lay­outs with Bor­ders and Neg­ative Mar­gins in CSS: I am almost cer­tain this will come in handy soon.

Quick Tip: Using Nested Styles with InDesign: Holy crap, this is going to save me SO MUCH time.

Learning to Love HTML5: Because I already know how to love SmashingMagazine.

You Suck at Power­point!: Tips for better-looking presentations.

Busi­ness

Are You a Freel­ancer Or a Con­sultant?: An issue I’ve been thinking about a good deal of late.

Hand­ling Cli­ents Who Just Aren’t That Into You: My cli­ents love me, so of course this is never an issue.

I usu­ally use Scripta­li­cious for my AJAX needs, but I’m working on a set of AJAX-ified forms on a web­site that’s already using jQuery, so I figure hey, it can’t be that hard to change over! Twenty minutes later, cue the loud cursing and growling. I mean, the whole thing seems far more powerful, but every time I’ve wanted to start imple­menting it, I’ve been turned off by how com­plex it seems to do simple things. (Like slide down a div window, which I hope to have accom­plished before I turn 30. On a side note, I’ve been feeling old because I turned 25 today, until my little sister sent me a mes­sage saying that I’m “plenty young, for a pres­ident!” Which I sup­pose is tech­nic­ally true, so I don’t feel quite so washed up anymore.)

Anyway, back to my jQuery-induced head­ache: this very helpful thing to the rescue! If I can stop being dis­tracted by the gor­geous site design, I might be able to figure this stuff out, after all, without having to spend all day teaching my brain new methods of pro­gram­ming. I do so love pro­gram­ming tutorials written for designers. Thank you, pretty col­ourful website!

I really enjoyed this little story­book. Some­thing about childish/60′s-esque illus­tra­tion (espe­cially when paired with more adult sub­ject matter) really appeals to me. I like that the illus­trator man­aged to use a techy “cold” object like a Mac­Book and still have it work with the more tex­tured & nat­ural style (the screen static was an espe­cially nice touch).

Dear God, I wish I’d made this web­site: Butter London. It’s pretty much my holy grail of web­site design. I love the typo­graphy, I love the way they actu­ally found a “butter” colour that’d work in the back­ground, I love the varied tex­tures and the scroll­work and the slightly old-wallpaper feel of the whole thing. The subtle anim­a­tion effects are great (that’s how Flash ought to be used, if you ask me, and I love that there’s a little skull and cross­bones used to offset the foliage. (more…)

…for a girl goes on and on about how “you should make sure to update your web­site on a reg­ular basis, or else!”, I’m pretty ter­rible at doing it myself. I’ve been trying to get into the blog­ging thing, but I’m having trouble motiv­ating myself to post at least once a week! For shame.

(more…)

Damn, you look fine.

Where’ve you been all my life? Or, more accur­ately, where’ve you been the last four years of my life, during which I never once wor­ried about prop­erly citing an essay penned by three authors quoting a stage play by an unknown play­wright? I mean, the Virgo-perfectionist in me really loves style manuals. And I really need to work on my typo­graphic cor­rect­ness. I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve only VERY recently come to learn about using my proper em-dashes (I’m still a little unclear on en-dashes). Cli­ents who didn’t auto­mat­ic­ally smart-quote their own HTML (read: all of them) for a while were the bane of my exist­ence, until I cajoled a pro­grammer friend into writing me a block of reg­ular expres­sions that does it auto­mat­ic­ally. I’m making progress.

Anyway, I know it’s been a while, but boy, have you ever kept your­self in shape. What a typo­graph­ic­ally pretty website.

My job is not stress-free!

I am pretty much a con­stant bundle of stress. And while I realize your art­icle is more of an advertorial than any­thing, I still have to dis­agree. (more…)

I did the cra­ziest thing this Sec­ular Hol­iday Season: I took time off work. I drank brandy with my Granddad and went pretty-dress-shopping with my little sister. I adopted an almost-semi-regular sleeping pat­tern. I drove a snow­mobile for the first time ever. I went to mid­night mass, also for the first time ever. I curled up with good books (not for the first time ever). I even went a few con­sec­utive days without checking my email.

It was fantastic.

The week before Christmas, of course, was utterly insane. Ever since I was little, I used to spend the month of December staying up late, gluing and building and painting, frantic­ally trying to get everyone’s hand­made presents fin­ished on time. A few years ago, I stopped this entirely. One year, I did all of my Christmas shop­ping at the liquor store (various pretty bottles full of sauce for my alcy family) and gro­cery store (Hershey’s Kisses for everyone I love). It really did make things easier.

I’m not even entirely sure how it happened, but this year, that beau­tiful idea flew right out the window. I had a week, and a to-do list of other things on which I ought to have been focusing, but somehow I found myself up all night again, trying to teach myself to solder and etch glass and quill paper, all with varying degrees of suc­cess. I was stressed out to the nth degree, my hands were black and covered in cuts, I was rationing my sleep and avoiding my work—but I think that it was really good for me, too. It’s been too long since I sat down and did some­thing with my hands, and I forget how nice it is to get away from this screen.

And I think, in the end of it all, I made pretty neat stuff. I made orna­ments (rel­at­ively suc­cessful), and ginger­bread (suc­cessful in terms of my baking ability, which is nil), and mono­grammed glasses. I spent hours making a styl­ized por­trait of my little-sister/best-friend (which I’ll be sure to post once I’ve fin­ished the final details, so maybe by NEXT Christmas). But by far, the most ambi­tious endeavour was a set of throwing stars for my boyfriend.

The target wasn’t hard:

Although I should have put cork on the top layer, and painted that. It’s com­posed primarily of banker’s box lids stuffed with copies of this awful free barhopper’s magazine that I stole from around town, and it’s going to fall apart pretty quickly.

The throwing stars them­selves were a little hit-and-miss. Only one is actu­ally soldered together, and it took three nights of sanding, sol­dering, and cursing to get that right—and as you can see, it still came out angled wrongly and tar­nished and covered in bits of extra solder. The rest are held together with various dif­ferent glues, elec­trical tape, and wires, and though they don’t look as stun­ningly beau­tiful as I’d been hoping for, they’re all razor-sharp and they stick into things you throw them at.

I’m back into the to-do listing and manic, sleep­less nights, but I still feel refreshed, and as though I’m attacking things with new vigour. Over half of my to-do list con­tains unbil­lable tasks, and I keep get­ting ideas for new pro­jects and pro­cesses. Maybe it’s just because the snow is melting out­side and birds are singing, but I feel like my burnout might be rekindling.

Happy New Gregorian Cal­endar everyone!

P.S. Hey, look! It’s a crazy Art Deco logo!

So according to the Gospel That Is the Internet, I have an ambi­dex­trous brain. (See: pretty bal­anced between the left and the right sides.) As with most self-evaluations, this came as a mon­ster of a rev­el­a­tion to me. Sud­denly, all my years of con­fu­sion and ambi­val­ence seem less like a per­sonal failure. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt like I’ve been con­stantly fluc­tu­ating between two ends of a dicho­tomy, and it caused me a great deal of anxiety when I was a kid. (I still haven’t learned that I have better things to worry about than my self-identity.) I like math and art. I’m inher­ently chaotic, but always hyper-detail-oriented, and, every now and again, neur­ot­ic­ally organ­ized. I always assumed it had some­thing to do with my bipolar nature. I’m a woman of extremes, and don’t often do the Middle Ground. (more…)

Well, it’s now offi­cial. As I write this, I have an hour and fif­teen minutes left of my day job. I’m hoping this means more sleep in my future, but it’ll also mean a lot less money—a lot of people think I’m crazy for leaving a well-paying job at a com­pany that treats their employees like gold, but some­where amidst the but­ter­flies and churning in my stomach, I’m sure it’s the right choice.

Things I’ll miss: over­coming tech­nical obstacles. Playing with Flash. How warm it is in the morning, when the pilot lights have just kicked in. Seeing my designs in some­thing that ships hun­dreds of thou­sands of units all over the world. Sneaking min­is­cule phrases like “Rugby boys have pretty legs.” into icons used in such. Med­ical benefits.

Things I won’t miss: freaking out when my alarm clock doesn’t work. Never get­ting to go out dan­cing on a Thursday night. Being stuck inside when it’s sunny and gor­geous out­side. Design that involves balls. Ser­i­ously, if I never see a ball again, it’ll be too soon.

I’ve been working on this redesign for a long time. It’s actu­ally been redesigned three times, and of course it isn’t 100% ready to launch, but I’m quite sure it never will be, and it was about time I updated my stag­nating website.

Lots of stuff is new. Everything’s been restruc­tured and rebuilt using Ruby on Rails. There’s a resources sec­tion that’s pretty wiki-like up. There are RSS feeds of the news and the pro­jects. There’s more con­tent every­where. And reason why I’ve been so quiet the last little while?

• folkharbour.com
• bluenosedining.com
• nsyl.ca
• the BusStop
• Inside-Out Cleaning Services
• the Switch
• Traveller’s Joy
• Ninja Monkey Knits
• News­paper Ad

…plus a ton­sil­lec­tomy, and com­puter woes like you wouldn’t believe, and learning a new pro­gram­ming language.

Say hello to Marigold, who’ll be working with me from now on. Marigold will be taking over some pro­ject man­age­ment duties so that I can become more of a hermit.

Say goodbye to Dinah, who dis­ap­peared in November and prob­ably isn’t coming back.

New pro­jects are in the pipeline, and I have offi­cially quit my job in order to go freel­ance full-time. Need some work done? Now’s a great time to ask, while I’m still a little para­noid about that whole not-getting-a-paycheque thing.

I’m excited. Everything is new and I am learning things at such an expo­nen­tial rate. It’s going to be one hell of a ride.

Thanks to com­bined incom­pet­ence at Apple and at my “local” (see: an hours’ drive away, only open when I’m working) Apple retailer, I haven’t had a com­puter all month, which has ser­i­ously cur­tailed my design activ­ities out­side of the gaming industry. I’ve got a few pro­jects on hold and a few nearing com­ple­tion — expect updates soon.

For now, a listing of my favourite Google search terms that have brought people to this website:

• “why don’t humans hibernate”
• what web­site can i go to to make a layout of my bed­room then print what my bed­room would look like?
• jen­nifer arnold dis­play and design
• grunt labourer services
• hrm unorthodox
• “sarah pretty”

Thanks for the com­pli­ment, Google! I think you’re pretty, too!