The colors all depend on the final layout, but here’s the logo in its final form otherwise.
Once the colors are finalized I may still go back once more to edit. I doubt it, but if I decide on a dark logo it may get bright rays around the heart and motion lines around the duck and letter; it would keep it peppy, though it might look too busy. For now, what I have is what I envisioned — it just took far longer than I anticipated to tweak the type.
Similar to the font test, I want to see if any of the colors change drastically enough to warrant avoiding their use.
I could have spaced them out a little better, but more worrisome is that I’m starting to rethink the primary color idea. I’m so bad at picking color schemes, but I don’t want to cheat by scouring the web for something that someone else is already using. As long as I use color sparingly my concept might still pan out.
I’ve started generating ideas for the redesign and my brain is running a mile a minute. The best place to start is by simply choosing a font for all the non-stylized text. I looked into using a Perl script that generates images for headlines and such but that may be a little excessive.
For now, here are the fonts I’m looking at using for general text. They’ll degrade into each other of course, but I want to see just how varioius blatform/browser configurations handle each font.
Sans-Serif Fonts
Arial, else Courier
Helvetica, else Courier
Serif Fonts
Palatino, else Courier
Book Antiqua, else Courier
Georgia, else Courier
Times New Roman, else Courier
I came up with the following matching game to pass the time — mine just as much as anyone else’s. The idea came to me as five gold dollar coins jingle in my pocket. If I gave one to a homeless person, would he recognize it as legal tender or would he be annoyed? Then, Could that be a test for homelessness — lack of recognition indicating a removal from society shared only by panhandlers? I quickly dismissed it as something I’d never even bother trying since I’m not about to foolishly go around handing out dollars to every bum I see.
By the time I made it to the urinal, I thought Which one of my friends was it who said “I give my change to every person I see begging for money; that way it’ll help along whatever bad habit they have and they’ll die sooner.” It took only a few seconds to place the name, but as it’s been over five years since the statement was made I’m surprised it stuck with me. It made me wonder if anyone else would remember the quote or the person who said it.
There are quite a few other gems rattling around in my head, from oft-discussed to private. I’d like to see how many people can match them to their originators.
So without further ado*:
It was a lot harder coming up with a list of one-liners than I thought it would be. Most of the people I know are better in funny situations or telling clever anecdotes than with the one-liners. Still, it’s a pretty good list and I’d love to add to it as people can think of quotes by other people I know or have more suitable ones for those I’ve already listed.
*My memory isn’t perfect, so naturally the “quotes” aren’t exact.
It’s official: Dia and I are booked on our Caribbean cruise. After months of merely thinking about it we took the plunge and made our reservations. It ends up being only four nights on the Celebrity Cruise ship Zenith but for one of the nicest cruise lines around — reknowned for its five-star cuisine and the lowest staff to guest ration — it’s a great deal. We also reserved two extra nights in Miami to extend the vacation a little. It wasn’t necessarily in celebration of our one-year anniversary, but since we don’t leave until March it actually works out well.
At first I was reluctant to take a vacation in the middle of winter. It’s a little frivolous considering we’re going to Hawaii later in the year and Dia’s constantly complaining that we should be saving for a house. I finally came around because I’ve never been one to turn down a trip anywhere. My other objection was that Dia wants to get away from her daily headaches like work, school, and other daily miseries instead of dealing with them; I was torn between helping her face her demons and helping her escape. Since she’s recently started working on her resume, however, and appears to be interested in living her life instead of stressing about it, I figure I can help her the most by being supportive the one time she has the urge to do something irresponsible like take a cruise for no particular reason.
I’ve been keeping myself busy working on some websites over the past few months. I’d been meaning to document them all along, but it was hectic enough finding time to work on them, let alone write about working on them, too. If I hadn’t waited until now to get my thoughts organized enough to type them out perhaps some of these former projects would be something I was still interested in working on.
Kon brought up the idea of a site listing various Quizo venues one night during a game, and the next morning he was the proud owner of both myquizo- and myquizzo-dot-com. When he asked for suggestions or ideas I threw my hat into the ring as a designer and copywriter; before you knew it I had whipped up a logo and concept for the splash page:
Kon thought it eye-catching enough to ask me to design and code the site, and I think I was flattered enough to dive right in. We toiled together for two months and it was a lot of fun. Despite having my designs subject to Kon’s approval (after all, it was his project and he got the ball rolling whereas I would never have found the motivation to up and start it myself), I was largely content; compliments from Kon and other friends definitely made it a worthwhile experience. Before we knew it we had a working site, complete with search funtionality and house ads:
It soon became more work than I anticipated and I found myself frustrated most of the time. Finally, one small design change request from Kon pushed me over the edge and I opted to bow out gracefully. It had never become the partnership I had hoped it would and I left Kon to handle things the way he wanted. I was still a little dismayed over leaving the project but Tim’s words of consolation gave me hope, that Kon didn’t fully appreciate having a designer at his disposal. it took me a while to see that he was right — it would be easier for me find a programmer to do the back end of any site I design than for a programmer to find a designer willing to work for free.
Kon seems like he’s still having fun and I’m glad the site’s taking off now, but I can’t help being a little dismayed at how the design is starting to crumble. For one, the site has a whole new look on the front page:
The changes were made in response to some negative feedback he received and I don’t blame him for wanting to revise his own site, but a lot of his problems could have been fixed with small changes instead of starting from scratch. And while the inner pages have remained pretty much the same — with the exception of nice additions like forums and a quizmasters section — small changes have begun to take hold that incorrectly reuse bits and pieces of CSS, don’t render properly in Firefox, or shamelessly use code-heavy tables that don’t degrade nicely. It’s a long way off from XHTML compliance and the short jump to being readable on moblie devices when I was working on it. I’ve always had trouble letting go, and I’m constantly fighting the urge to email him with copy changes to make the site more professional and slick or offering to help here or there with some style issues.
In the end I made the right move and learned to avoid future headaches by seeking out projects where I’m either compensated for my work or have the majority of creative control.
By the time I sat down to code the site I had pitched to a guy in New York over the summer, the realizations I had made during the Quizo project had changed my mind. I didn’t like working for free, and working for 20 percent of the profits until I recouped my fee for a complete website would pretty much amount to that (especially with current online sales totalling less than $20 a month). Also, I didn’t want to work on a site with so little content and for a client who, in my opinion, wasn’t terribly professional and didn’t have the right goals for his company’s online presence. MyQuizzo.com has a wealth of content and was extremely satisfying; having to design and fill something so barren and disjointed would have taken a lot more out of me. So I pretty much fell out of contact with the owner and will probably reuse portions of the design for another site.
For what it’s worth here’s the design I came up with:
The problem with the site, regardless of the design, is that the largest amount of copy are praise for the product and the list of purchase locations. Once I retooled the site to be more of a marketplace and reconfigured the testimonials into a database that served out one per page, there would be nothing left to host on the site. There might be a short description about the towel and it’s benefits, maybe even a little about the manufacturing process, but not enough to warrant a different section about each outdoor activity.
It’s still a great product and I wish Mr. Wheeler lots of success in the future, but I don’t think I could work for him or what appeared to be misguided notions of what his site could be.
Here’s the site as it sits now:
Not all the stuff I’ve been dabbling in has been for naught. Tom asked me to put together a proof of concept for the eventual redesign of Newgrounds since slimmer HTML is something Tim has been requesting for a while. It could possibly turn into a more serious venture for me down the road if certain things fall into place, but I’m not pressed about it. It was just nice to have something on which to test a few new CSS concepts for myself without worrying about content and design just yet. Also, the fact that I took the time to work on this helped convince me (true or not) that I wasn’t being lazy with the other sites and that I really was staying true to my creativity.
I’m dusting off the cobwebs and making my first New Year’s resolutions a bit early: to return this site to its former mediocrity. I’ll have to take baby steps at first, but regular posting will eventually lead to a complete redesign, a tie-in with my photo site (which desperately needs updating as well) and hopefully a few other projects I’ve been putting off. It will be a lot of hard work, putting into action all the things I’ve got planned, but I’m definitely ashamed enough of my personal portfolio that I’ve got to do something about it. First things first, and regular posts are a fine start.
I’ve got a list of excuses why I don’t write anymore:
So things are about to change.
I think I mentioned before how I liked Geof’s idea of using the blog as a companion piece to other, more serious endeavors. The only problem with that until now was that writing was usually a project in itself, and where do I fit the off-the-cuff posts about nothing in particular once the site has a new purpose? I may have found the answer today in the form of Categories, which have until now gone unused. Hopefully in the redesign I’ll be able to incorporate them better, but for now I can at least tag my entries properly. By labeling my entries, the site can be all things to all people in the not-too-distant future.
I owe it to myself to maintain a record of the projects I’ve been working on; and I think I owe it to my friends and family to keep them apprised of what I’ve been up to and how I feel about things. For not living up to that lately, I’m sorry.
Let’s see how it goes from here on out.