Journal
The Nine Star Story
Archive for the ‘Web Sites’ Category
“It’s About Time!”
My redesigned portfolio is almost complete. The HTML is set and now I need to work on the CSS more and gather all the content. I was hoping to finish it before the week ended but there were too many distractions during the time I set aside to work. My biggest distraction is doing research on wikipedia and looking around flickr. I thought about just disabling Airport but that makes me feel crippled, but I will try it this week.
I am completely stoked about StarCraft 2 that was officially announced over the weekend at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in South Korea. It looks amazing! The game has been in development for four years but no release date has been announced. There are no new playable races but the units have new abilities and have been changed according to the StarCraft story line. The trailer is great but you have to see the actual game play. I hope it comes out by the end of the year.
Korean at Blizzard WWI
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXoekeDIW8]
English
Dee left for San Marcos
Now that Dee has gone back to San Marcos I have been extremely board and a bit depressed. I really haven nothing else to do after work other than spend time filling in Spotlight comments (meta data) into my files. I really enjoyed seeing Dee after work everyday. It was always the best time of the day. She will be coming back in a few weeks so it won’t be too long before I see her.
I recently discovered Yelp the other day, and I have been spending a bit of each day reading and writing reviews. Its a place for people to review places they have been and it is built beautifully. I’ve been looking for places around Houston and San Marcos. My reviews aren’t anything special but I hope will direct people into places that are nice. I am trying to get all my friends to join so please do if you haven’t already got my invitation.
I have been contemplating on weather or not to add a side bar to my journal. There isn’t a real reason for me to do it since no one reads this and I’d rather not add a bunch of useless things on the site. I might just add the side bar once I get past another year with WordPress or if people start actually visiting my site. I did find a article that can add AJAX functionality to WordPress with some minimal JavaScript. So I think I will add that sometime soon. It’s from Gianni Milanesi’s Weblog if you are interested.
I recently said that my portfolio was going to be update but I lied. It is still in the process of realigning elements and possibly a redesign of how it is laid out.
Dilettante
Dilettante \DIL-uh-tahnt\ noun
1: an admirer or lover of the arts
2: a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge : dabbler
I really like this word. It describes myself in full. Art and Design has always been the center point of everything I do. The objects I see give inspiration and make me wonder how they were designed. The sounds I hear form an atmosphere that I can piece together something amazing.
My job has been given me the chance to create and build more upon my knowledge as a designer. The sites that I design for customers have to be quick and match the way our company designes sites. Since I’ve been working I’m working on speeding up my design process. Now that I’ve been working for about three months things have been running smoothly. There is always somthing new that I have to learn.
I am going back to school next month to earn more credits to transfer to Texas State next spring semester. I am taking a History and Cultural Anthropology with Dee. Anthropology sounds a bit though but Dee is smart so she can help me a long with that. We have a few things planned for our summer. There is a visit to the Zoo, bicycling, and going to see Lewis Black peform on June 23rd.
I signed up for the Photojojo newsletter recently. The have really cool photography project tutorials on their site. They have a Flickr group as well that I joined and I need try and submit photos to. I don’t know, I really don’t have that many great photos on my Flickr. Although, I am currently saving up money to buy a Canon PowerShot S80, which I am sure will jolt me into taking more photos. I still have my Polaroids to post in bigger format.
Toggle the hold switch
My nano froze today; it was stuck on the “do not disconnect” screen. Luckly the Apple Support site has a lot of information on troubleshooting. They’ve won awards because of it. So yeah I experienced my first nano problem after five days. That seems a little weird. The only reason why I believe this happend was because I let the nano’s battery drain low while at work. When I got home I plugged it in while the hold switch was on and set to sleep. It’s just kind of depressing because I thought these things wouldn’t run into problems. Oh well…
I designed a layout that I am proud of today. I’d show you a screen shot but I am still working on entering their content. I will definatly post it by this weekend along with the others I have done. The site was for an insurance and financial service company based here in Houston. They wanted me to design them an indentity as well which turned out pretty well. The colors that they wanted on the site were Red, White, and Blue. I am not a fan of using this scheme but I think it turned out pretty well. The more I look at it the better it looks to me. Now it just needs the copy to fill things out. I used some css tricks that I would not usually use on sites at work. So I think this is my step into doing sites a little bit better than now. I still had to use tables though.
CSS Mastery
I recently bought CSS Mastery over the weekend. It contains a lot of the latest CSS techniques and information about browser bugs and ways to get around them. I haven’t read many books on CSS techniques and I really needed a new one on what is being done by the masters recently. After the first two chapters I really wanted to recode my whole website. Which will be the plan within the next few weeks. Apparently I’ve been using div and id tags too much in my code. It’s just the way I have done it for a long while. There is a better review of it in the current issue of Treehouse Magazine.
I did some nice websites over the week and I really wanted to update my portfolio with them. The only reason why that never happend was because I bought the book. This seems like a better place to post selective websites I did this week. I will probably post more details to them later and add the links to what it looks like live.
I-10 Auto Auction
This is one of my favorites of what I’ve done so far. I spent most of the two hours of initial design time on the header and menu. We didn’t recieve much content so it was quite easy finishing that.
Vintage Glamour
This site design was fun to work on. I didn’t want to spend too much time on it because we were unable to contact them for their logo and content. It is a pretty simple design that worked out the way I wanted it.
Parsons Mortgage Group
One of the many mortgage websites our company has done. We’ve used just about every stock photo of a house out on the internet. I found a dover illustration of a nice house on a illustrations CD that I bought years ago and I really think it looks great with the green. It makes me think of the clients location.
Cypress Heating and Air-Conditioning
This is a pretty well designed layout that I’ve done. I’m glad this client had a good logo to begin with. A lot of the small companies that come to us don’t have one and we have to try and come up with it in a short time.