Graphics & Design
Fermata
Feb 27th
This theme will be in place temporarily while I work on my own redesign – it’s also an experiment of sorts. Since I started working on my own theme bit by bit, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the amount of comment spam I was receiving. So I’m going to leave it up like this for a few days (weeks??) and see how it turns out.
It’s also been getting busy again at work, and who knows, I just might chuck the whole kit-n-kaboodle and just live with whatever I decide.
I’ve done it before!
Another One Bites The Dust
Feb 5th
Again, no further on the design front – mostly because of work.
As alluded to previously, there are big changes coming along here at work. I can talk about them now as the rest of the company knows. In a nutshell, my department is getting cut. Just after Christmas, I was told that the company I work for is getting out of the hosting business, and as that pertains directly to what I do (build and update websites for the banks we host), I suddenly felt like I had the carpet yanked out from under my feet.
Turns out this isn’t the end of the world, however. My department consists of myself and my boss. That’s it. When her boss told us, she told us in separate meetings. The reason behind that was, while they didn’t have a position for my boss, they did have one for me. I’ll be doing similar to what I’m doing now, but for in-house clients. I’ll also be doing more print stuff; postcards, posters, brochures, etc.
While this isn’t 100% certain, it is about 98%. I just need to show my possible future boss that I have a sense of design. I’ve been working in Illustrator the past few nights trying to create a post card to showcase my design skills. Can I just tell you it’s absurd that Illustrator doesn’t have a crop tool?
Anyhow.
Wish me luck. This sounds exciting and new and different and I’d really like to take a shot at it. And if I get it, considering I’ll be doing print stuff, I’m going to beg and plead for a Mac to work on. Yes, I’m devious that way.
Colors
Aug 24th
There is a decided lack of color in my life as of late. This has been very much in evidence over the past few days as we’ve not seen the sun in almost a week. We’ve had gray, cloudy, Oregon-coast like weather, unseasonably cool, but blessedly wet (we’re in a drought right now. We need the rain!). It seems as if this blandness in colors has been carried into my life.
I guess it’s obvious that this site is rather bland – pale, vague hints at colors, if that. The yellow in the background is muted, and the rest of the colors are various shades of grey, with the exception of the links. We’re doing better in our real-world life; we have some nice reds in the house – but our bedroom has white walls, and my basement has light brown wall paper. Nothing exciting, nothing invigorating. I want something that pops!
I’ve been a member over at ColourLovers for some time, and I enjoy creating palettes. I wonder how some of my favorites would look in either a website, or as a color combination down in my basement or my bedroom;
While this one has browns, it has the nice contrasting blue in it as well. Might look good on a site, probably not so much in my basement or in my bedroom (unless I did the walls in a light tan and got all new linens in blue for my bed).
The greens are nice in this, and I think they contrast nicely with the grays, but again I think it’d be better for the website than a bedroom. In my basement, I might think I was in a fish tank.
Just kidding… 
Some nice browns and oranges here, but again, I see it more of a website color than a bedroom color. The basement would be brightened considerable done in an orange.
This one I could see on both – on a website it has the nice neutral colors, with good contrast, nothing to bland or dull in my opinion. I would also put these colors in my bedroom or basement, more likely the lighter shades on the wall.
Some color links:
That’s just a few – there’s tons out there. And as you can see from my palette selects, I suck at colors. I need help.
Valerie’s Trowel
Aug 15th
I like to mess in Photoshop, but I’ve not been able to in awhile. We had Photoshop CS3 here at work, but because of a snafu in licensing issues, I had to go back to CS, which quite frankly, is probably more than I actually need. Want is a different matter all together.
While reading Valerie’s site, I found a picture of a trowel she’d taken*. I thought it was a not only an interesting picture, but one that I could mess with in Photoshop a bit, and see what I could come up with.
I decide to orientate it going from lower left to upper right, and then used Curves, Levels, Brightness & Contrast and the Burn tool to bring out some of the highlights, as well as color correction to bring out more of the red in the bricks. I liked how blue the metal of the trowel came out.
It’s mostly just a fun experiment. Unfortunately, the monitor here at work sucks balls and the color isn’t the best on it. I’ve noticed when I’ve gone home and looked at stuff on my monitors at home (most noticeably, my palettes from colourlovers.com) that the colors are all wonky. I’m hoping to get a new LCD here at work eventually – but I’m not holding my breath.
*naturally, the copyright for the picture goes to Valerie herself
Undecided
Jun 28th
As mentioned before, I’ve been trying to come up with a new layout for my journal here, without much luck. I’ve had several goes, and thought I’d share what I’ve come up with. I wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts on any of them, whether good or bad. Each pictures links to slightly bigger version so you can get the gist of the whole layout.
First up is one I worked on for awhile. I like the leafy design of the logo as it was actually kind of what I was going for. But the rest of it felt flat. The light purple bar the logo is sitting on top of extends most of the way down the page and would be the sidebar.
Next is another green one, this one more of a marble type. I liked the subtleties of it, but again, something just wasn’t clicking with me and I moved on.
This next one was more of me just goofing around with the ‘S’ and ‘P’ for a possible Shad’s Pad logo, and then wondering if I could make a layout with it. I was thinking a centered one, which was unique, as I believe all the ones I’m showcasing here were more on the left.
Here was my venture into “Web 2.0″ territory. Gotta have glossy logos to qualify for Web 2.0! I didn’t have a beta badge though, so it failed the test.
A ’59 Cadillac is the theme for this one, along with yet another type of logo. I kind of liked the logo as I thought the subtle curly brace that the SP makes was clever, but it’s still to much 1980′s cheese for me. And I should never try and be clever.
Finally, here’s yet another orange/gray layout that I actually played with for quite a bit before giving up. I even had a color palette I’d made up for it. Once again, however, it just failed to really grab on to me and say “use me!” There’s a joke in there about needing a woman to do that to me, but I’m not grasping it.
Like I said, I’d welcome any and all comments you might have. Perhaps if enough people like a certain one, I’ll move to that and continue to try and improve on it. And, naturally, right before this post, I was working on yet ANOTHER layout.
God, I need a life.
And once again…
Nov 29th
Yes, I’m messing with the layout again. This layout is from the same people as my previous layout, and was geared towards a Digital Photography community. I liked the color scheme and layout, so I’ve tweaked it a bit (with surprisingly few issues) and have decided to use it for awhile. I might change that photo of the cactus…then again, I might not.
I actually am working on yet another theme, this one created by me. I hope to get it implemented before the years end, but you never know. I want to get a lot of things done before years end, but I doubt a tenth of them will get done. Get to do that whole holiday shopping thing here.
weee
Writer’s Block?
Jul 5th
I’ve been trying to create a new layout for my site here, and failing spectacularly. Trying to come up with a decent logo/color combination has been tedious and depressing. Simply put, I suck.
There needs to be a “Design Eye for the Shad Web” type of tutorial or something. I can’t do anything right. Color combos, logo design, layout — They all suck right now. I need Martin or Sarah to design me a new “Shad’s Pad” logo. I’ll pay them in Jelly Bellys.
I’ve been looking at sites in CSS Remix and CSS Beauty, as well as CSS Vault and the CSS Zen Garden, hopefully for inspiration. I’ve found a lot of nice sites that I like, but I don’t want to copy them. So instead of inspiration, I find discouragement instead.
OK, pity party over. Back to your regularly scheduled surfing. Hopefully I’ll have something more entertaining than the default soon.
werkin’ it
Jun 28th
There’s gonna be some changes around here over the next few days as I get a chance to poke n’ prod at the site. So don’t be surprised to see a totally fubar’d layout now and then. I mean, c’mon, you know it wouldn’t be a Shad undertaking if I didn’t hork things up now and again.
Browsers and Markup
Mar 31st
As a webdesigner, one of the struggles I face on a daily basis is making my pages appear the same in as many browsers as possible, mainly Internet Explorer and Firefox. Trying to adhere to W3C standards and making the pages look and act the same can be a frustrating, time-consuming process. When using tables to do layouts, it was fairly cut and dried (with the odd gaps appearing in Netscape), but using tables is a no-no (at least in the standards world. I admit, I’ve resorted to table based layouts when pressed for time. Bad Shad!). While building my current project for work, I was experiencing a problem where Firefox wasn’t showing my layout like IE was, and for a change IE was presenting the layout correctly.
One of the things to be aware of when building layouts purely in CSS, is that every browser will treat the HTML markup( p, h1, h2, br, strong ) differently. For instance, in Firefox, an H2 tag might be given a margin of 2px while in IE, it might be 5px (I don’t know the exact numbers). Suffice to say, the difference can be big. When doing the above said layout, I gave an H2 tag within the layout a margin of 0 and padding of 0. And that fixed the issue I was having.
Just thought I’d pass that along.
He shoots! He….misses?
Jan 27th
So I finally get around to do a somewhat new design, and you know what? I already don’t like it. Not only is it too restrictive, but it’s not very different. I was hoping for a layout that was more unique, or if nothing else, a fraction of a difference than the average CSS Blog layout. I don’t even know if I want to fix the comments now (yes, they’re borked too).
Bah. Now I’m depressed.