8 posts tagged “design”
Definitely some room for improvement, both in the theory of it all and in the technical aspects, but going through this process made me realize that this sort of thing could be something for me to look into further.
I'm quite pleased at the moment as I've pretty much finalized the new layout for the redesign that I'm doing of my friends website (Wassyart.com, might as well drop another link plug in). Now I need to rip it out of Photoshop and actually make it into a website, A process which I will be starting in a few minutes here on my lunch.
Pretty happy with how it turned out. I'm undecided if I want to post a little preview image up here or hold it until the redesign goes live. But the process was really rewarding. Well, it was also really frustrating too at times when things weren't working right. But as soon as everything clicked, and elements started falling into place it was extremely satisfying watching it all come together. More satisfying than progress on some of my other side projects anyway. I do think I'll keep doing this stuff as a hobby, at the very least. I'm excited about perusing it more.
Also last night, for dinner my friends and I went a little Indian. Our favorite keeper of the recipes, Pioneer Woman posted one for Chicken Tikka Masala. Considering this is one of our most favorite Indian food items, we decided to give it a shot. I took care of the cooking which went without incident except that I burned myself on the oven door pretty good. Owwww.
The end result was very awesome. I made it just a smidge too spicy so that next time I do it, I'll have to pull back a little bit on the heat, but we're definitely going to keep that dish in the rotation. It's fairly cheap too, now that we have all the spices and such for it. Tasty win.
If you had a time machine and went back a year to tell myself that I'd be willingly signing up to take another college course, I would have told you that you were nuts. But here I am.
Ended up going over to the local community college yesterday afternoon to straighten some things out. It appears that my re-matriculation application wasn't processed like it should have been, which would delay my registration at least another week. But I wanted to make sure I could take this one course (happened to be one of the few introduction type courses offered at a time when I could take it this semester) so I wandered over to have it added to my plan of study.
I hate how they have their registration system set up. You need to add classes to your plan of study through an advisor before you can actually register. So I just added this one class temporarily until I was able to actually get added and talk to somebody from the graphic design department to get things set up the rest of the way.
So now I'm registered to take a course in Digital Typography starting in August. Really hope this is interesting. And maybe that it leads me down a path that's more suited to where I feel I should be.
As the title of this post states, I survived the weekend. Which is quite a feat considering what was baked up on saturday. Yes...local fresh strawberries are in and that means Strawberry Shortcake Cake!
It was everything we had hoped it would be...the cake bit was awesome and the icing was...I can't think of enough good words to describe the icing actually. Highly recommend this item to anybody who happens to like strawberries. Or cake. Or food.
I think it goes without saying that it's gone now. And we all made a point to go to the gym this weekend to try and limit it's effect.
Other than the strawberry shortcake cake, the weekend was fairly generic. Saturday was kinda a lazy sort of day punctuated with some running around and shopping stuff. I bought a table for our balcony, pretty much completing the set-up out there. It's quite nice now, with two potted plants and some chairs and a table. Good for hanging out when the weather is cooperating. I also bought a laser pointer to terrorize the cat with. It also works on Fish, surprisingly enough.
One note on the laser pointer though...it made a big deal on the package about how it met FDA specification. This sorta freaked me out because I was trying to figure out what the Food and Drug Administration had to do with regulating lasers. But, apparently every laser product since 1976 has had to meet standards published by the FDA. Go figure...
Sunday I spent continuing to work on Wassy's website redesign which hit a snag. It could be a potentially huge snag...but it's my fault for assuming what the site would look like at 1024x768 instead of actually looking at it. Now I need to go back and rethink the positioning of things because it wasn't working out at all. I'm not sure what I'm going to do at this point, but I'll figure something out. I don't want to change anything too major because I really like the overall look of the site, but pretty much everything I did this weekend needs to be redone. Really want to get this done, and get it done well.
I'm happy to report that last night I jumped over the stumbling block I mentioned yesterday that I was having with Wassy's site redesign. I need to do a few little tweaks to the header but then perhaps I'll post a little preview up here so you can see what I've been talking about. The problem was I was thinking overly complex and it just wasn't working...so I scaled back an idea a bit and ended up with something much nicer and more workable.
And speaking of progress, I've been thinking about maybe taking a few graphic design oriented courses at the local community college (as I believe I've mentioned before). Like I also probably mentioned before, I've always been interested in it and it might possibly be something to look into considering I'm fairly dissatisfied with where I've ended up right now. And even if it ends up not being something to pursue seriously, it'll make me more well rounded in the end.
I popped over there yesterday afternoon to gather some information about stuff and get set back up in the system in case it's something that I'm going to end up doing. I'm thinking of just taking a course here and there to start, just to see if I'm interested in continuing and then going from there. There's a lot of stuff up in the air right now, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to at least prepare. The biggest issue at this point is finances unfortunately. But it's something I feel like I owe to myself to at least explore. I haven't been this excited about something in quite some time.
Well...aside from the new artwork I just got from Wassy. That's pretty darn exciting too. I hope I can do as good of a job on her website redesign. I really really appreciate all of the time she's put into doing artwork for me and this is a chance to reciprocate a bit.
As I mentioned I've been working on a new web site design for Wassy's gallery site. I was really hoping to get the basic header graphic all set this weekend, but I've run into a few snags. Stuff that work working I ended up not liking and I had to scrap a major element of the header unless I can rework it into something that looks good.
I was trying to play around with it yesterday evening to mold it into something I was happy with, but nothing was really working. Which resulted in me not getting as much (productive) done as I had wanted to. And now I'm trying to brainstorm some ideas that might work to fix it/replace the part I scrapped.
On the upside though, I finally finished Final Fantasy IV. I've been playing the DS version and after stopping and restarting twice over a period of several years (well one of the stoppings happened on the Game Boy Advance port, at the end boss) I finally managed to make my way through the evil hardness that is Final Fantasy IV. They don't make em like that anymore!
The building our apartment is in has a shared laundry room. One washer and dryer for the 6 apartments that are in the building. And since I'm up so early on weekends, I found it's pretty reliably open at 7am on Saturday morning, so that's when I've been doing my laundry. My friends follow me when I'm done since I can let them know I'm done and they can hop on board.
Except this weekend when the washing machine was broken. Dah. We ended up having to go out to one of the area laundromats and do our clothes there (and sit with them). Which resulted in a loss of productivity on what was supposed to be a productivity oriented weekend. I wanted to do some more work on redesigning Wassy's site and she wanted to get some artwork stuff done. It cut a couple hours of productive work time out of the day unfortunately.
We were originally intending on going to see Drag Me To Hell this weekend, but we've pushed that off a bit due to the productivity issues experienced yesterday.
Wassy's site redesign is coming along pretty nicely so far I think. I'm working on the header of the site which is going to be the biggest time sink since it's the most art intensive part of the design. But so far so good. And the more I use my Bamboo, the more I like it. It's very nice having a graphics tablet for this sort of work. Makes a huge difference. I'm still enjoying my shift in focus to graphic design type stuff, but like I mentioned earlier, we'll see if this keeps up.
The evil overlords that run the US postal service decided they felt like dropping my new toy off yesterday morning. My Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet has arrived! I got to spend some time yesterday evening playing around with it.
It's a little weird to use at first. I keep trying to use the pen like a mouse and recentering it on the tablet when my hand reaches the side of the pad. I'm just so used to using a mouse for things that I need to unlearn some behavior. After an hour or two I started to get more comfortable with the basics of how to use it. Hovering the pen over the tablet to move the mouse cursor is also something that took some getting used to.
But I started doing some actual work with it this morning and it feels really nice. I'm starting to do a redesign on Wassy's website (wassyart.com) which is going to be the maiden voyage for using the tablet. It's just feels so much more natural to do that sort of work with a tablet instead of a mouse. And I'm still just getting over the learning curve. Seems like it was an excellent purchase.
This will be my first major design project for somebody else so I'm a bit nervous about it. Hopefully I can do a good and make something that will look cool.
