Too often within the design community, I’ve come across vile and harsh words said towards another designer’s work. Myself included. Continue reading “Mindful Observation”
Planning the Future
The future is intimidating. It’s unknown. No matter how much I want to plan for it, it still remains vague. Mysterious. What will the future hold? I’m currently working to try and get myself a portfolio site up. Hopefully, that process will make it’s way here.
Until then, my future remains suspended in this viscous like matter. Only when I start to really put words to paper, or code to screen, will things start to solidify and feel more grounded.
I’ve realized that Case Studies will probably be my best bet to getting hired out in San Francisco because my design skills are most likely not strong enough to be competitive. I do feel as though my technical writing and analytical abilities might be.
Progress wise, I’ve identified the pieces of work that are going to be showcased in the portfolio and written short descriptions of the project. The next step will be to delve deeper into specific case studies, detailing why they failed or why they succeeded.
I failed to get a subdomain up on my website, and because of that block, I’ve felt a little discouraged. But I think it will be refreshing to completely scrap my old site and get WordPress up and running. The goal is to get something up by the end of the month.
The other thing that needs to happen is to create a brand for myself. Probably one of the hardest endeavors a designer can do if we get too involved. I just need to step back and simplify.
I have the outline—I need the motivation. It’s time to get to work. Otherwise, it might seem like I don’t want this change, or I’m too scared to roll with it.
Testing Worlds
Testing Worlds.
This has a lot of weight attached to it. But so does this blog. A lot of testing of different worlds has been happening as of late, I hope all of it gets documented…to some extent. To be honest, I’m not really sure what I should be doing with this thing, or even HOW I want to do it. I guess it will be a learning experience.
First thing: I’m trying to do more and think less this year. I’ve found that it keeps me from acting on the things I want to do. I could sit all day and think about how I want to do something or they way I want it to work, but I’ll never actually get around to completing it because I’m never satisfied in my head.
Which is dumb.
So first thing I just “did”? Make the logo and style this blog. Granted, I had a lot of moral support from the other author on this blog. But hey, I did something. Was a bit of a learning curve, since I don’t do this often. Usually at work, we either just design and let a developer handle it, or just buy a theme with all the bells and whistles and make things look nice.
With this little test world, I’m just cracking into the default theme and seeing what I can do with it—so maybe the overall look of the site will change over time. Maybe it won’t. Let’s see how lazy I get.
Simplicity was the goal, though. Black + white. Simple logo. No clutter. No extraneous pages—though, you could probably argue the “About” page is just that. And best of all, no real goal. Other than of course, writing.
I managed to get a reading progress indicator to work on the pages, but now it’s on ALL the pages, which is unnecessary. That took a bit of work though. A lot of reading, but mostly just copy and paste with a little CSS change, because fuck if I can understand JQuery. Maybe some day. But Sunday was not the day. Or today. And probably not anytime in the near future, but maybe later this year.
But when I say copy and paste, I mean Copy and Paste. I moved that jquery and html tag all over the fucking place in all the damn php files until I got it to work properly and how I wanted to. And you know what would have saved me a shit ton of time? Reading the fucking comments in the code. So maybe the next item on my list of things to change this year is to read more carefully.
Anyway, I guess this was a success. I got it up and running. And now I’ve add a post to it. Though that progress reading indicator was very close to being a failure. But it was good learning, either way.
P.S. I’m using this post to style block quotes. Maybe I can get them to not look so fucking lame.
Test World
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