In random news, I just recently purchased an iPad. Been trying to use it as a digital sketching device. Perhaps I may start posting the products of that here? Maybe. Will just have to see. I’m still not 100% positive what I want this place to become. It’s always really hard for a web designer to take time away from doing this stuff for a living to actually work on your OWN site!

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Every year Starkville, MS holds a citywide tailgate where businesses try to out-do one another in who has the most Mississippi State spirit. My former employer, Campus Book Mart, enters every year and they’ve even won the contest many times. (Of course, it helps that they’re a college bookstore with a collegiate merchandise section where they sell nothing BUT Mississippi State stuff.) I’ve done art for them for the tailgate many times, but this is the first time I did something when I wasn’t an employee any more. It was fun just to do something off of the computer, and to get some more practice/experience with painting—admittedly not my strongest skill—and of course to get out into the sun and eat some good food. A photo of me with the painting is below.

I unfortunately didn’t get to finish it, as I had to work on it on my own time, so the football field and stadium seats are lacking in finesse. But Bully (MSU’s mascot) turned out pretty well. A girl that works there did the part with the rules of when to ring the cowbell (a sort of Mississippi State tradition that’s under threat of being ended); I think it was done on Canson paper or something and applied to the canvas. (Which is why it doesn’t fit with the curves of the parchment I painted.) But I left off the wording so that it could be used again if they wanted. Overall, even unfinished and with a wayyyy too bright sky/football field, it was a fun experience.

I’ve got to get back to work on my current side project… Hopefully I’ll have more to post soon, probably more web-related stuff. And hopefully, MAYBE, I’ll work on the design for this blog over the coming holidays…

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How to Effectively Organize your Photoshop Layers

This post from Web Designer Depot details a very useful way of organizing your layers in Photoshop for web designs that will help you to keep things simplified and orderly. I prefer to use Photoshop (and occasionally Fireworks) to create my web designs, due in part to this wonderful ability to categorize layers in a highly-organized folder structure. I had already been using a “header”/”main content”/”footer” structure similar to this, but I like the convention of categorizing things further and utilizing this for every design by creating a template. Should speed things up nicely!

IE6Fixer

This one is an interesting tool to help smite most Internet Explorer 6 woes.  You can create a nice IE6-specific stylesheet that will, for example, append { display: inline; } to floated elements to keep the double-float margin bug at bay. I have yet to use this yet, as I usually just manually code websites and will do most of these things without thinking, but I might could use this in optimizing my workload.

CSS3Pie

I found this a few weeks ago, but it seems to be a nice, elegant way of whipping Internet Explorer 6+ into shape for use with the marvelous CSS3 specs.

That’s all I have for now, hopefully soon I’ll have some more work to show. Ciao!~

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I just recently finished a side project for my old place of employment, Campus Book Mart here in Starkville, MS. I did the design for the new site(s) (currently only MSU makes use of it), while the guys that work there did the development/coding. This was pretty much my first ‘official’ freelance side project, so it was an interesting learning experience. Check it out and let me know what you think. Looking back, there are tons of things I’d change, but, as with all things it’s always an on-going learning process. No choice left but to keep moving forward!

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The Boys & Girls Clubs of the Golden Triangle site was launched on Thursday (2/4). It’s a very small site, done on a very small budget, but we’ll probably be adding more to it over time. The Monroe County site was also launched, but I will not be linking to that one… I really wish they would have let me get in there and fix and improve upon it, but that hasn’t happened. But it’s evidence of the difficulties one sometimes faces when a project changes hands (or designers) mid-development—no real organization or direction, unclear message/lack of focus, etc. Chalk it up as a lesson learned I suppose.

Next week I’ll be working on updates to the Form Trainer site. I’ve learned quite a bit of new tricks since I developed that site last fall, and am going to make some pretty cool changes, most of which will be relatively transparent to the end-user but should help the site in the future.

In the non-Web world of work, I’ve finally gotten back into the habit of drawing on a mostly-daily basis. I have quite a few sketches going at the moment, most of them unfinished or close to being finished. I’ve also committed to a sort of drawing group that will be working together over Google Wave to collaborate on individual projects. Two people in the group are friends from grad school, and the rest are friends of one of them. We’ll basically be taking basic shapes and all creating characters/designs based on those shapes, just as a sort of side exercise to keep each other moving forward in learning and improving our skills. I will probably post the results of these weekly sketch sessions right here on CS, so feel free to check back periodically.

Tomorrow I finally plan to buckle down and start sketching and wireframing some designs for this site and my pro site. I’ve already got a color scheme in mind for both, and a relatively rough sketch for a logo for this site, but that’s about as far as I’ve had time to get. I’m hoping I can crank up some Pandora, sit down at my drawing desk and get some creativity flowing. As tempted as I am to just get something, anything up on here, I’d rather take my time and craft something that fits my standards. Plus, the fact that I’ve got to use WordPress on two sites I’ve worked on recently has seriously improved my understanding of how WordPress works, which should help me have a better idea of how to proceed with designing elements needed.

Well that’s all I can ramble about, so I’m off to play some Final Fantasy 7.

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Check out the DRIL Project Showcase [PDF]

I’m the one on the far right on the first page, btw.

The designs that I did (other than the entire showcase PDF) are:

• Monroe County, Mississippi (Go Monroe) - this one unfortunately didn’t turn out how I would have liked; I was asked to add in too many links when I wanted to keep things simple and organized. But this design was originally done by another on our team, and I had to re-work it. (Not yet launched)
• Boys & Girls Clubs of the Golden Triangle – this one was done on a very limited budget, so it’s very, very simple. The local B&GCs have been struggling financially so they didn’t have the funds for a better one I suppose. (Not yet launched)
• Injury Mechanics Laboratory – I like how this one turned out, there are some issues I’d still work with on it (not happy with the footer for instance), but overall pretty good.
• Chickasaw County Development Foundation – I love the concept for this one, but my execution of it wasn’t that great. I was just beginning to really learn to use Illustrator when I did this, during my last semester of grad school. Not quite on the same level as my traditional illustration skills yet. They are going with another design anyway, but I plan to continue to work on this for the portfolio.
• Form Trainer – Now this one I am exceptionally proud of. I know there are some issues with it too, but this is the best site I’ve done so far, by far. It was very difficult for me to do also considering I had to integrate it in some way with the Yahoo! Stores platform. I never got the hang of RTML or whatever it’s called, so I ended up using their “store tags” instead.

So yeah. There’s a sampling of some of my web work. Still got a lot to learn and a long way to go, but I’m enjoying it every step of the way!

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I installed OpenCart after that, which seems pretty simple and is also pretty, which helps. I like pretty things. Unfortunately after I got it all set up, I couldn’t really do much of anything because once I was into the admin area if I idled for more than a minute I would get logged out. After trying multiple ‘fixes’ found on the OC forums, nothing worked. And their host, Network Solutions, won’t let you touch the php.ini in the event that this was (probably) a sessions issue. I did try adding php.ini’s into the directory and the admin directory with the fixes as directed but, again, no luck. So, OpenCart was deleted.

I noticed Network Solutions’ hosting comes with the ability to add Magento, so I installed that through their administrator panel. Easy to setup, but once I got in there I was completely lost what to do, and the documentation is abysmal. The front-end AND back-end were also incredibly slow loading, and this is on NetSol. Shared NetSol, but still… NetSol. The very first domain registrar. It sucks, because I kind of want to learn Magento, but oh well. Magento was nixed. I’m trying OpenCart once again, and hoping that maybe the problems I had the first time were just a bug. Maybe it’ll work this time. If not… I guess I’ll have to figure out Magento, because I refuse to use tables-heavy OS Commerce.

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Take myself for instance. I currently work full-time as a Web designer, but I also do illustration work and am in the process of learning photography, traditional graphic design, and concept art (which I consider a subset of illustration) as my time allows. I also have an interest in 3D modeling & animation that has fallen on the backburner. Of course, I’m hardly a master at the things I currently do “professionally”. I’ve only been out of school now for around 8 months. I’m not so naive as to think I could ever become a true master of Web design, though I certainly try my best—I’m constantly absorbing information from various design-related sites and RSS feeds and observing and learning from the work of those greater than myself.

I’ve come to realize, however, that the more I spread myself out across these various disciplines the more difficult it becomes to do them as well as I feel that I should. Reading all of these various design sites and working on Web-related work leaves me with very little time to work on my true passion, art and illustration. Very few clients like the more “artsy” designs of sites such as Web Designer Wall, preferring more conservative looks using basic shape elements. So I can’t usually express my interest in more illustrative looks in my professional work, which leaves only sites such as this one for creative experimentation. But with the little free time I have keeping up with the Design World™ and still trying to learn as I go, there isn’t much time for all of that, as this site’s current non-existent skin indicates.

I do think there can be a lot of good in experimenting with these different methods of creativity in that it helps to broaden your horizons, and helps keep things fresh. But when you’re somewhat of a perfectionist like me, once you start getting into something you want to go all out and become the best you can be at it. I guess since I was never much of a sports nut growing up this is the way that I get competitive, even if I’m competitive against myself and a faceless “them”, the other designers that are out there doing their thing.

Ultimately though, I guess eventually I’m going to have to decide on what I want to be my main area of focus, and relegate the rest of my interests to side projects. I’ll just have to see how it goes.

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The plan is to post thoughts, sketches, finished pieces here—but only the cream of the crop will make it to my professional site.

So, I hope you’ll join me in the next few weeks as I work to get the ball rolling on all of this. I know I’ve been putting these things off for years, focusing on work for pay, but the fact of the matter is, all work and no play has made my life very boring lately. So I aim to rectify that with experimentation in different media—digital photography, acrylic painting, concept art, illustration, and web design—the progress and results of which you’ll be able to see right here.

Stay tuned.

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