Second design for Cutter’s site. I’ll try one with some actual color next.

Our company just purchased a new site relating to massage therapy training and work. We’re redesigning, so we need a new logo. Here is my submission. The good news is, as we’re going to be Wii boxing to determine the winner, I stand a good chance of winning!

I’m doing some work for a band-mate of mine, Cutter Gage. He wants a site for his music. I’m drawing up a few designs, but here’s the first. It still needs a little work, but I want to get approval on an idea before I really move forward with it.

I’m going to work on a second one tomorrow, hopefully.

My dad and his wife just made the trek up to Kansas to help me and Janelle finish out our basement. Improvements include adding two light switches and wiring for two lighting fixtures, putting in an entire ceiling, and adding a wall to block off a portion of the basement for storage.

If you don’t know, hanging drywall on the ceiling is hard! Even with the eight foot sheets, it’s pretty labor-intensive. So we got pretty tired out doing that, and the wall was the last thing we put in. We did some quick measurements, built the wall (if you don’t know, you build the frame for a new wall first and then put it into place), and put it into place, only to discover that my house was built crooked. The wall is seriously slanted. So we had some work to get it into place.

This is the most amazing part, though. Christine (my step-mom) just got a big-ass hammer and started hitting the wall until it went into place. I was so tired that it took me a moment to register, but it soon clicked: You could just hit it until it worked!

This got me thinking about how much easier my life would be if there was a web design equivalent.

PNG transparency not working in Internet Explorer 6? *Whack!*

Three pixels off in Internet Explorer 6? *Whack!* One pixel off. *Whack!* There, I fixed it.

I think, really, I just want a way to hit Internet Explorer 6.

Anyway, the ceiling and wall are in. Janelle and I still have to finish mudding and sanding both and at least paint the ceiling before we can put the lights in. Soon, band practices will be held, and I’ll be able to work out my web design aggressions on my congas. All will be right in the universe.

I had a portfolio and résumé on my old site, but I never created one for this site. I’m coming back around to wanting one online. This site doesn’t count, because (a) it’s in WordPress, so I’m not showing off my coding skills, and (b) I want to show more examples of my work. I also don’t necessarily want my personal blog tied to my professional portfolio. So I started work tonight on a smaller portfolio site. You can preview it here. It’s just an image now, but when it’s built, each of the sections will be a larger box than the initial page.

I welcome any feedback, especially from my designer friends. So far, it’s only an hour of work, so it’s not at all a complete look and feel—more like a rough sketch.

Since I’m now feeling better from my virus attack, I was finally able to get some work done on Sarah’s site. I want to add a more functional gallery and possibly a calendar that she can use to schedule dates, but that’s the preliminary site.

I’m the kind of person who really doesn’t like car commercials. If they’re entertaining, sure, but they scarcely are. On top of that, you don’t really learn a lot about the cars. There are those ridiculous ads where big trucks carry even bigger trucks up big hills and stuff like that, but I really have no idea what it would be like to actually own one of them.

So I decided to make my own car ads—ads that speak the truth. Here’s what I came up with.

• The Kia Amanti
• The New Volkswagen Beetle
• The Ford Taurus
• The Hyundai Genesis (warning: coarse language)
• The Porsche Boxster

I just discovered a Windows XP accessibility feature that I’m going to use from now on. It’s called MouseKeys, and it allows you to use your numeric keypad on your keyboard to move the mouse pointer. Why do this, you may ask? Well, designing web graphics, I frequently have to move the mouse pointer only one or two pixels, which can be a real pain when actually using the mouse. With MouseKeys, I just hold the left mouse button down and press the arrow once or twice. The best thing is that it can be easily turned on and off—it only works when Num Lock is on, otherwise the keypad behaves just like the normal arrows.

To turn this on, go to Control Panel and click Accessibility Options (which was the first options for me). Under the Mouse tab, there’s a checkbox to turn on MouseKeys. You might want to turn up the top speed and acceleration from their default settings.

I’ve been working on some new stuff on the side.

First, I threw together a blog for Lauren. I’d done the design a while back, and just put it together tonight. If you find any bugs with it, let me know, since I basically just cloned mine and switched out the images and changed a few of the CSS properties.

Second, I’m working on an interactive calendar for Sarah’s site (which I can’t show you, because it’s still in production). I’ve found a PHP calendar that will display a month and its events, but you have to re-load the page to view each month. I’ve also found a JavaScript date-picker that constructs the months and, when you click a date, fills it into the date field on a form. It doesn’t pull from a database. So I’m going to have to merge the two together with some AJAX. A big undertaking, but I’ll have the calendar in my toolbox after that.

Third, I promised Janelle a re-design of her blog, since I’ve gotten better at design since designing hers initially. This will have to wait until I’ve made some progress on Sarah’s site.

As a designer, I sometimes seek out inspiration. (That’s something all creative people talk about when they don’t want to blame themselves for not having any good ideas.) Sometimes the inspiration is other websites. But I’ve found a better source: Colour Lovers. It’s an online community of people who just love color. They love talking about it, looking at it, and putting it together. The discussions are great (scroll to the bottom of the page for blog posts), but it’s that last one that really gets me. Color palettes. Thousands of them, all selected by creative people with an eye for design.

The palettes usually have a few keywords attached to them, and all of the keywords are searchable on the site. So if I’m looking for a vintage palette, or one that evokes citrus or autumn, they’re easy to find. Users are also allowed to rank them, so you can browse through the palettes that the users of the site liked the best. Just browsing through a bit, here are a few good palettes I stumbled across:

Giant Goldfish
London Bus
Trip Through Clouds
Choc Mint (I might play around with this one later.)
Sugar Bamboo

They also have an option to search for a color range. So if I want to use crimson in a website, and want to find some other colors that go with it, I can narrow the color range to shades of crimson and get every palette that uses a color within that range. (I think we chose the color for one of the rooms in our house using this tool and a painting that we wanted in that room.) Very cool stuff.

I like this better than looking at other websites because it’s a very raw source of inspiration. There’s no worry about copying a design, or needing to change it enough so it’s not just a rip-off of the inspiration. Certain combinations of colors evoke a feeling, but it’s still up to me to interpret that feeling and present it properly.

Anyway, there’s your inspiration for the day, creative folk. Enjoy!