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!

What the hell does while (!feof($f)) mean?

Check it out—the SEO rapper:

http://theseorapper.wordpress.com

I want to see someone apply for a job in search engine optimization, and when they ask you what experience you have, you say, “I learned this stuff in the streets.”