Speaking of, I’ve just completed a marathon of three brochure’s in two weeks. Well ok, only two of them were actually designed by me, the third was for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and they had some sort of technical catastrophe or something, and I had to finish the brochure work. So call it two and a half. But either way, it’s been hectic, and I’ve put in some overtime to get everything done in time.

Really the key to it all was just concentrating, and a lot of the days that meant getting the heck out of the office.  There’s a little coffee shop I go to called The Bean Cup, even though I can’t stand coffee, but it’s very relaxed and a good place to get away. I often find that I’m better able to concentrate away from the office.

Also, since I’m currently an in-house designer, I’m often given projects before all the content has be thought out and completed. I’m sure my fellow designers can agree about how frustrating a situation that can be. Getting away from the office means my boss has to email any project content, which seems to result in getting it completed instead of piecemeal.

Not working for a design studio, my office is not a real creative environment, and if you’re in the same type of situation, you may find it helps a lot to get out of there, find a place you can sort of relax, but still be in a ‘get stuff done’ frame of mind.

Back to what I’m doing now

Anyways, now that all that work is done, this coming week I’ll be updating my portfolio with the new designs.  I’m really happy with how they came out, they are very radically different designs.  One is laced with textures and photoshop effects, lighting and such. The other, I didn’t even touch photoshop once, I went with a very clean, horizontal bars and bold type look.

So now that the hecticness is over, I’m taking a week off from work. I’ll be taking the time to relax, work on my portfolio, maybe make a blog post or two, and generally try to get some work done for myself.  And of course get some good Warcraft time in with the family.  I’m looking forward to it.

So I was checking the blogs that I follow as I do every day, and there was a great post today by Chris Coyier over at CSS-Tricks.  He talks about something that is just oh so very true, and actually quite frustrating.

Most of us maintain several different websites for several different clients. To the client, their website is their whole world, so it makes perfect sense to them when they shoot you an email asking you to change a date quick. But when we open that email, we get the uhmmmmmmm….what feeling.

I feel your pain my friend.  Right now I only maintain one website, kenlongassoc.com, but because it’s a special events company, and there are so many events online at any one time, I often have the same problem.  Sometimes there are instances where the same bit of information is in multiple places on an event page, but only one of those instances has the error in it, so I’ll have to spend my time hunting down the problem, when just a little explanation would have saved me the time and trouble.  Quoting Chris again…

I would much prefer being treated like a six year old. Not being talked down to, just being VERY VERY clear about what is needed:

• What page needs changing (URL link!)
• Does it appear in multiple places?
• What does is say now?
• What should it say?
• When does it need to be done?

These are great points, and I believe all clients should follow them.  It will save time, and allow any changes to be made that much more quickly and easily.

Read Chris Coyier’s full post at Css-Tricks.com

Bah, I’m sure it’s fine, and I’m just over-analyzing this and making it harder than it really is.  I think I just need to go with it, and it’ll be fine.  So there.

I’m pretty close to having the portfolio site done, which is good cause I could use one less project on my back right now.  I’ve got a couple things that my cousin has asked me to take care of, and I’ve also started a wordpress theme design that I’m planning on putting up on ThemeForest.  Little hint…the name I’ve chosen is Final Frontier.  It’s coming along well.

I also had an idea for another wordpress theme that’s much more minimalist.  I’m kinda excited about it, I’ve had the idea floating around in my head for a while, but today for some reason it just sort of geled together into a design in my head.  So that’s gonna be fun to work on once I get to it.

And yes, I’m still planning to redesign this blog itself too.  It’s going to match my portfolio site, with the yellows and greens.  I’m really looking forward to getting that taken care of, but it is low on the totem poll right now.

So I guess this ended up being a general update on what’s going on.  Back to the ol’ salt mine now for me.

Web developers these days are often expected to know and work in multiple languages. As a result, it’s tricky to learn everything a language has to offer and easy to find yourself not utilizing the full potential of some more specialized but very useful tags.

Unfortunately we haven’t been tapping into the full potential of these more obscure HTML tags as of late. But it’s never too late to get back into the game and start writing code that taps into the power of some under-used tags.

Here are ten of some of the most underused and misunderstood tags in HTML. While they might be less familiar, they’re still quite useful in certain situations.

Go check that post out!

Well, I’ve been working on my portfolio, and for once I feel like I’m making real progress.  The design is sort of the same as the main site is now, in that it’s the same colors and feel, but much more proffesionalized (see, I can make up my own words and there’s nothing you can do about it).

I recently saw this post by web design god Eric Meyer, and it really cleared some things up for me regarding CSS.  I quote,

Turning a bunch of divs or list items or whatever into table-role boxes is no better than just using table markup in the first place, and it’s arguably worse. Using element names other than table and td to create layout tables, and then claiming it’s not using tables for layout, borders on self-deception.

Not to mention doing things that way means you’re doing your layout in a highly source-order-dependent fashion, which was one of the things about table layout we were trying to get away from in the first place.

The entire post bears reading, but really, that says it all right there.  Why is there such a hubbub about CSS-tables lately?  CSS was designed to get away from tables for layout, and now some people just want to go back to the way things were?  Then what was the point?

Like Eric says though, the fact that this is coming up is just a symptom of the lack of a strong layout system within CSS.  Floats are hacks, Absolute positioning is taken out of the flow, it all just makes it extreamly hard to make a well designed website that follows the “rules”.

Anyways, that’s all for me tonight.  Hopefully I can get back on the ball with this place and get back to talking about the stuff that interests me.  That’s what this blog is all about after all.

Polar Bear 09 Brochure

And just for comparison’s sake, here’s the brochure I did for last year’s event.

Polar Bear 08 Brochure

So in conclusion, I’d just like to say Happy New Year!  Hope everyone has a great 09!

Apparently there was a miscommunication, because I thought we were going to be doing postcards instead of full blown brochures for the events from now on, but apparently that’s not the case, at least not for all events.  So I’ve spent the last few days on a postcard design project for the Polar Bear that is now a brochure project.  It wasn’t a total waste of time, because I’ve at least got the design of the brochure figured out and know how I want to do everything, it’s just a matter of reformatting content and re-doing background images and such to be the correct size.

But I thought I’d also go ahead and post what I had gotten up to on the post card up on here, so you could have a look.  Enjoy.

Post Card Front

Post Card Back

But, now it’s up, and most everything seems to be running smoothly.  I noticed a couple bugs here and there that I need to fix up, and I haven’t put up the forums yet, that stuff should get taken care of tommorow.

I love this new design, I feel like I’ve really improved over my previous work.  I’m really glad I got the opportunity to do another design for this site.

Now what I really need to do is work on my own site, hehe.

a[href^="http:"] {
background: url(../images/externalLink.png) no-repeat right top;
padding-right: 10px;
}

a[href^="http://www.kenlongassoc.com"], a[href^="http://kenlongassoc.com"] {
background-image:none;
padding-right:0;
}

The first bit puts in the icon, and of course the second bit keeps it from showing up on internal links, cause that would be stupid.  The problem that I’m noticing, is the icon also shows up next to images that are linked, and I’m not sure how to prevent that.  It looks bad when next to images, and also moves around my Flickr feed, and that’s just no good.  I’m sure I’m just missing something that should be completely obvious, but I need some help on this.  So here is my cry for help.

Oh how I wish I could just work on websites and graphics stuff without getting distracted by the actual event stuff going on too, would make things so much easier.

We bought a new laptop at work, and it’s pretty nice actually.  I’ve kinda commandeered it for my own use, I’ve ended up taking it home every night, haven’t actually gotten on my desktop at all lately.  It’s got 4 gigs ram, running Vista Premium 64bit, it’s a nice little machine, powerful enough for me to mess around in Photoshop with it.

Speaking of Adobe, Creative Suite 4 is supposed to be coming out very soon!  I can’t seem to find an exact date anywhere for some reason, the most I’ve heard was later in October, so who knows exactly when.  I’m currently using Macromedia Studio 8, which I paid for myself, and Creative Suite 2, which was paid for by work, so I think now is a really good time for an upgrade, and for me to actually buy myself the Suite.

Planning on getting the Design Premium bundle, it’s got everything I work with regularly, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Fireworks.  Well I never actually use Fireworks, always have done all my image work in Photoshop.

Anyways, can’t wait to play around with all the new software!

And I believe that will be all from me for now.