Posts Tagged ‘websites’

I’ve been doing some work with email news­let­ters of late. It is, of course, a bit of a chal­lenge, given how email is even less reli­able at prop­erly inter­preting standards-compliant CSS code and the like. (Ser­i­ously, one of these days, all these com­panies will get together and start imple­menting code con­sist­ently, across the board, and web designers across the world will sud­denly find that what used to take ten hours now only takes one. Com­panies like the fab­ulous BrowserCam will go out of busi­ness. Why is so much of our eco­nomy built on busy-work? Screw the unem­ploy­ment rate, I want effi­ciency!)

Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:

• Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
• Out­look 2007 will make things look ugliest. Appar­ently, this is because it uses the MS Word ren­dering engine. Now, ser­i­ously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design any­thing in Word, well, you know how impossible it is. They do, how­ever, provide this handy little “val­id­ator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Out­look. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!

On a vaguely related, but mostly unre­lated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been dir­ectly involved in doing design work for a cam­paign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the elec­tion than I usu­ally am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Liber­tarian, if you can! Effi­ciency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)

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!

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determ­ined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearran­ging. (more…)

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…)

So I’ve moved yet again and am just get­ting back on my feet. For anyone who may be inter­ested in sending me lovely things in the mail, my new address is as follows:

TRIGGERS & SPARKS GRAPHIC DESIGNS
6987 Vaughan Avenue, Hal­ifax NS
B3L 2M2

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I was recently con­tacted by a design stu­dent at Loy­alist Col­lege looking to inter­view a designer for an essay she’s writing. Ego-bloat aside, I do really like it when young(er), just-starting-out designers ask me for a “worldly” view of the industry. (Amaz­ingly, it’s happened more than once!) (more…)

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…)

I gave a present­a­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guidelines for how to make a web­site more effective. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­ment­a­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the pro­cess of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guidelines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (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.

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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.

I have a total love-hate rela­tion­ship with Valentine’s Day. (Yes, I know this comes a little late, but I’m about a week behind on everything else right now, so it seems somehow fit­ting.) Yes, it’s trite and silly and you should be nice to the people you love all year long, and not just when you’re oblig­ated to. Hon­estly though, I know I some­times need a little extra push. And the girly side of me is always dis­ap­pointed when I don’t get flowers (I’ve had a lengthy string of boy­friends who’ve com­mitted this sin, thinking that I’d dis­like being given them. Ser­i­ously, who dis­likes being given flowers?)

At any rate, every year, I have the best inten­tions to lov­ingly hand­craft gor­geous cards for everyone, and every year, I never get around to doing it. (I guess at least I have my tra­di­tions, even if they involve dis­ap­pointing myself!) This year her­alded a near-success, as I threw together a card at the elev­enth hour (lit­er­ally, it was eleven o’clock):

Aren’t I adorable?

It’s amazing how good it felt to spend just ten minutes drawing for fun again. Ten minutes! You’d think I could get into this habit, no?

On a side note, I’ve been insanely busy. Added two new pro­jects: a logo and a web­site.

It was a busy week:

• an art gallery
• an online store
• a Live­Journal template
• and my per­sonal favourite

I love releasing new websites.