Posts Tagged ‘style’

Please note: this week I’ve been totally swamped with work-work-work-work, and since I’m still in a cast and typing the four thou­sand emails a day that run my busi­ness often makes me frus­trated and dizzy, I am utterly exhausted. I wrote this art­icle some time ago, and while it doesn’t have any­thing to do with design per se, it’s all about pretty things (shoes!) and we all know how I feel about that. We will return to your regularly-scheduled install­ments of rel­evant posts next week!

There’s some­thing about a pair of heels. They’re instantly classy. They work with everything, they make your legs look great, and they can turn the scrub­biest ensemble into a kick-ass outfit. A beau­tiful pair of shoes is a magical creature that will trans­form you into a soph­ist­ic­ated lady-about-town, even when you’re just run­ning out to the gro­cery store in your pyjamas and bedhead.

But when you live in a cli­mate that changes every hour, and the side­walks are almost always covered in ice (or snow, or mud, or random bits of gravel, or some com­bin­a­tion thereof), wearing heels can be haz­ardous to your health. As a girl who never wears flats and rarely suf­fers for it, I’ve picked up a few tricks and tips along the way.

(more…)

Two years ago, I made an incred­ibly rash decision. I was standing in front of a row of boxes, a little worse for wear due to an excess of cel­eb­ra­tion the prior evening. A sick feeling settled over me, and I decided to run with the impulse.

Two hours later, I was a blonde. (Actu­ally, this isn’t true. It took more like the entire weekend and six boxes of bleach to get there, which ulti­mately des­troyed my hair and left me with no option but cut­ting it all off, even­tu­ally, but that’s another story.) For me, it was a massive change, as I’ve always been prone to identify myself by my hair­colour. People often know me as the girl with lots of bright red hair (admit­tedly, I’m still working on get­ting the “lots” part back), and all the varied pre­con­cep­tions and ste­reo­types people have about red­heads tend to apply to me, too. (Whether that’s an issue of nature or nur­ture, I’m not quite sure, but let’s assume it’s irrelevant.)

So going blonde was def­in­itely an impulsive choice, and part of my desire to do so was to play with my own sense of self. It was fun for a while (mostly because I’d show up places to see friends, and they’d look quite shocked), but even­tu­ally I went back to some­thing akin to my nat­ural colour (after testing out almost every other colour com­bin­a­tion avail­able to me. Ser­i­ously, it’s no wonder my hair ended up des­troyed).  The exper­i­ment led me to realize just how much of who we are—both how we see ourselves, and how others see ourselves—is encap­su­lated in our appear­ance. As much as we may try insist on silly maxims like “don’t judge a book by its cover” and “it’s what’s on the inside the counts”, what’s on the out­side is almost invari­ably a reflec­tion of what’s on the inside.

(more…)

Lately, I’ve found myself giving a sub­stan­tial amount of design feed­back to non-designers. While I always main­tain that you ought to leave design to pro­fes­sionals, some­times this just isn’t feas­ible for one reason or another. So, in the interests of public ser­vice (pret­ti­ness making the world a better place, and whatnot), I’d like to offer up some sug­ges­tions that should improve your design across the board.

(more…)

January marks the three-year-anniversary of the day I told my employer to “take this job and shove it” (in all ser­i­ous­ness, HB Stu­dios was a fant­astic place to work, but Office Space was what gave me my moment of epi­phany required to take the leap). Three years seems like forever ago, and I’ve learned so much since then, but it’s always good to look back and figure out what I could be doing better.

So, where my major issue has always been burnout (both of the cre­ative sort and the plain old good lord, am I ever exhausted! variety), I’m looking to add more work-play bal­ance to my life. Over the past year, I’ve become better at adding play to my life, and, just in the end of December, I found myself unex­pec­tedly doing things I’ve always meant to do while run­ning my busi­ness, but have somehow man­aged to evade quite con­sist­ently: eating and sleeping on a daily basis, working less than six­teen hours a day, and playing with cre­ative pro­jects that take me away from The Machine.

My poor kit­chen table. It is utterly COVERED in ink stains now.

What I’m excited about for the new year, not sur­pris­ingly, are also the things that I’m pas­sionate about in my life. (more…)

The Good: Digsby is gor­geous. I love the gigantic fluor­es­cent “down­load” bar that gets OS-specific after you click on it. I love their coming soon page, too, although I might have pre­ferred to find an actual download.

The Bad: No more Digby. I’m trying hard not to think about it because it makes me sad. Why aren’t there more beau­tiful & clever, highly sat­ur­ated things around? (I am hap­piest in tech­ni­colour). I don’t under­stand why “reality” is so inter­esting. There’s enough reality right out­side my door; I’d rather the fantasy when I’m looking to get out of my head.

and the Ridicu­lous: Minggl thinks “b3k 4w5″ isn’t a valid postal code. It took me three tries to figure out they wanted me to cap­it­alize it. Ser­i­ously? Canada Post will deliver my mail if I forget the majority of the address and scrawl it upside down with a six-inch-wide marker, but some web app that isn’t ever going to send me mail can’t val­idate a lower­case postal code?

Also, why are all web apps named by dys­lexic five year olds now? I miss real words.

Because I’m sure that those of you who know me well don’t hear enough of my thoughts on design. This is a ques­tion­naire I filled out in response to a freel­ance job posting. It was quite an exhaustive pro­cess, actu­ally, and I only had a short time­frame in which to com­plete it, but I gave it my best shot. (I’ve edited out the “tech­nical” por­tion and the examples & attach­ments, as that sounded a little too much like a high school test for even me to be inter­ested in it!) (more…)

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).

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.