I'm a Mac, but I had to buy a PC
28 Jul
2009
Today I finally had to pull the trigger to purchase a new PC laptop for my Mom. Her laptop is so old — “How old is it?” — It’s so old that my new iPhone 3G S literally has more RAM than her computer does and nearly the same size HDD. The whole experience was truly depressing. I really don’t want to be the quintessential Apple fanboy, but I’m left with little choice in the matter. I’ve only been a Mac user for 18 months or so, but that’s really all I need to stake my claim. Picking which “cheap” new PC I was sentencing my mother to was like being forced to catch a cold, but you get to choose which one. Would you rather:
- Feel pretty decent but deal with a runny nose and a headache all day? Or,
- Feel absolutely fine, but then out of nowhere totally lose your lunch?
Dramatic I know, but to get something respectable, you need to spend close to $800 and then you’re close enough to Mac territory and you may as well Man/Woman up! My only constraint was a 15″ monitor a good reputation. First parts easy enough, the second was another story.
I argued valiantly for Mom to buy a Refurbished Unibody Macbook for the smoking hot price of $950, which sounded like robbery to her. I told her it was indeed robbery; she was robbing Apple with that terrific price. The deciding point was that her Real Estate Network in her area can’t be accessed from anything but IE. Mom, sadly doesn’t have interest in running a virtual machine on her shiny new Mac, so I surrendered.
At the end of the day, I made a decision. Don’t ask what the choice was because it’s really not that interesting. It’ll work marginally well for her, after she purchases Anti-Virus software and figures out how not to have it scan every time she’s doing anything at all. Moving on…
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Rearranging the Furniture
28 Jul
2009
Like many software companies, I’m updating my product so minimally that you may not even notice. Nevertheless, the update had to be done. No you won’t be agreeing to any terms and conditions or EULAs here, but you’ll observe a totally redesigned blog page and type changes across the site.
960.gs Homepage
I decided to finally put a grid system to use. I was hesitant because I didn’t really feel that it would make much of a difference. I couldn’t have been more wrong. After going back through some of last years 24 Ways articles, one posted by Tim Van Damme / Max Voltar got me to give it a try. It’s ridiculously easy to put in place and easy to hit the ground running. If you’re at all inspired by popular print work or more of a graphic designer type, grid systems are your new best friend. I thought I would need to add a lot of additional code to my stylesheet — wrong again. I simply needed to add a few class elements to my markup and I had a totally redesigned blog page. Checkout 960.gs to get on-board.
Posted in Freelance, Projects, Web Design, featured | No Comments »
Getting Some Love
14 Jul
2009
I spent the last week of June in Mexico dodging the Swine-Flu and practicing my Siesta technique. Upon my return, I noticed a significant jump in site visits. Since this site is in its infancy, I was definitely intrigued by this little post-vacation surprise.
Inspired Magazine, a daily graphic design mag, posted an article entitled “10 Creative Portofolios x 10 Awesome Studios = 100% Inspiration.” I was lucky enough to be the first portfolio listed. I know what you’re thinking, and no – yee of little faith, I didn’t compensate this person for a plug to my site.
I’m really glad that somebody found my site interesting enough to include in an Inspirational Design article. I’ll be rolling out a new blog page design that should be much better shortly. I’ll need a few more posts to flesh it out, so I suppose I’ll need to give this little puppy of a website some more attention.
You can follow Inspired Mag on twitter at twitter.com/inspiredm.
Tags: featured, News
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The New Digs
3 Jun
2009
I’ve learned a couple things about myself while making this site. Turns out I’m much better at making design decisions for everyone else. With the amount of design revisions I went through, I would have fired myself for sure. Choosing an aesthetic and sticking to it proved to be very difficult. There are just so many great ways to present info. Thankfully I’ve been busy enough lately and nobody’s asked me, “Why don’t you have a site of your own, Mr. Web Designer?” I knew it was heading for me and I didn’t have an adequate answer, so I found time.
The Plan
The content on this little weblog will hopefully be a horn-o-plenty; brimming with design tutorials, clever observations and wildly absurd opinions. Since I’m limited to just 140 characters per tweet and I don’t Book Faces, I’ll likely pepper in random arbitrary stuff from life. There are still moments that require complete sentences, the occasional capital letter and even some punctuation.
Colophon
I know ‒ it’s really bright. I love CMYK and they are about the only colors I never grow tired of. What other website would CMYK really be appropriate for? The background fade in/out of the main navigation was fun to toil over. It’s subtle enough that it may go undetected to the less observant folks. The few JavaScript effects that were added, like the contact drop down, were meant to be subtle and unobtrusive. The grand scheme was to keep this site clean and simple.
- Color Scheme: CMYK – modified
- Nav Background Fade – jQuery Sprites Integration (link)
- Font-Stack – Sans-serif: “lucida sans unicode”, “lucida grande”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
- Font-Stack – Serif: “Caslon Pro Regular”,”Palatino Linotype”, georgia, serif;
- WordPress Personal Theme Design
- #111 is the new Black Text
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