Syllie.com

Job Hunting

I really enjoy my life in Oz and I have enjoyed extreme freedom in doing freelance work and creating our resources site verysimpledesigns.com. And whilst my partner encouraged me to continu my solo ventures, I thought it would be good to look around for a cool job that at least brings in some steady money too. I am a bit too picky to relay on others for that - tho my partner keeps telling me that is the sole reason why some girls marry. Well.. I am a kinda independent girl I guess. Anyways, we talked it over and he told me please don’t go for a high profile job again, you will be all stressed and forget to enjoy life and sure will have no more time for all the cool creative things you do now. So I started looking around for a job that would teach me new things, allow me to develop some skills further and would consider me even tho I might be unqualified for some things (skills that are not much developed yet) but overqualified for others (work that I have done for many years and can do during sleep).

Web Designer/Developer

After a few days I came across an advertisement for a junior web developer/designer for a very company that is known for its search engine optimization work. I have done quite some website design and development, but on a different platform and mainly to provide access portals to adminstrative information systems. So this would be a new area, developing for Wordpress and most exciting - learning more about SEO optimization. I wrote a lengthy application letter, included my CV and said there might be a win-win situation - and yes I know it is an entry level job - money isn’t everything (not in my book anyways). We talked about it, I got a technical interview and I ended up with a new job. The very cool thing about this job is that there is no office, except for a virtual one. That cuts 10+ hours travel time out of the working week and should leave me enough time to continu creative work. The contract says that I am bound to work for them exclusively and not to undertake any work in a competitive field - so the freelancing webdesign is put on hold.

Cute Kittens

Also as you may remember our cute cat passed away last month. There was a litter of kittens at a neighbour’s house and my mate came home a few weeks ago and asked carefully if I would be interested in one of those little critters. I thought it would be a bit too soon, but I had to confess I miss a cat around the house. I grew up with cats and have held cats almost all my life. Last Saturday it became clear that all the cats from this litter had found a home already. Sunday we went to the RSPCA - we just went for a look at the kitten home and were sold immediately. There was this cute gray little lady screaming her lungs out to please take her home with us and a few cages down was a cute playful lady that might make a good playmate.  We  talked to the caretakers and the cats were put together to see if they could make good mates. We went home with both of them. The gray tabby has cute little spots on her belly, we named her Dax. The dark tortoise is 3 weeks older, a bit more dominant but surely the wisest of the two, we named her Moogie. You got to be a Trekkie to see the resemblance.

Dax

Moogie

I am working on improvement of the Joomla! template we use on verysimpledesigns.com. And as that is mostly an after hours job, it progresses slowly. I have to divide my attention to creating new content, finishing tutorials and re-design. All fun to do, but it is sometimes more fun to just doodle a bit. And that is what I did last night.

I simply opened up Inkscape and started to dabble a bit, with the idea to make a concept for a character creation tutorial. But I ended up making an easter bunny - and as that holiday is upcoming - I decided to share it. The vector is cleaned up and can pass any microstock scrutiny check - all paths are closed, no embedded text, no transparancies and no patterns.

I have published the vector as Inkscape SVG and eps format but also exported it to png in 300dpi and as web-friendly size with all bunnies scaled to 256 px height. The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License. Check it out: Freebie Easter Bunny Vectors.

Freebie Easter Bunnies

Tags: Graphics, Inkscape, Vector

I started to write a tutorial about seamless pattern creation in Inkscape a long time ago. I really struggled with it, as I was afraid it would not show enough original content, and also because the use of seamless patterns within Inkscape comes with quite some limitations.

Through verysimpledesigns.com I received a request for a tutorial on seamless pattern creation, and I figured I might as well finish and publish the tutorial I started earlier. Total composing time for this tutorial is over 20 hours and I still am not totally happy with it. My Inkscape “guinea pig” still needs to test it - and I hope he’s gentle in his verdict. It is available on the Inkscape tutorials page and I will announce it on the front page as soon as the final tweaking is done.

Create seamless textures in Inkscape

Tags: Graphics, Inkscape

When we started with verysimpledesigns.com last December, we did things low profile as we were frantically going through our designs to decide what could be used for download, what could be turned into a tutorial and we were not really sure what direction to take yet.

Thing is that we design stuff from logos to stationery and fabrics, but also create illustrations and digital art and as we are both techies, we do website design (front-end and back-end) as well.

I am quite familiar with CMS systems, but when we decided to use Joomla for verysimpledesigns.com, I had to learn a lot of new things. And as we just wanted to get the site going, we decided to use a freeware template, install some plugins and that was that. No big publishing campaign, so not a lot of visitors, which gave us a lot of time to sort things out and add some content to the site. We had some plans for reworking the design, but sofar it has just been plans. Today we started to talk about actually changing things.

We like the current layout. It is distiguishly different than most other websites - that conveniently use 2.0 to indicate their style, but we all know that again is just a buzz word. I like many of those layouts, but somehow one looks like the next and the next again. We do however need to redesign the website, to allow for more modules, get the breadcrumbs working properly, depend less on plugins, and optimize the site further for SEO. The site is quite easily found by most search engines, especially now all our image are slowly being indexed, but we sure could use a few more proper links. We are considering a link exchange page too (realizing that we are not that interesting yet, but at least we can support the sites that we consider to be cool).

So template design for Joomla, we keep the purple but I do not know where it will take us next. We also will finally implement forums so we can create better interaction with our users.

Lots of plans that will keep us busy for a while again.

Tags: Joomla, SEO, Web Design

Our cute cat

Most weeks life goes by in a nice reasonably predictable way and the days sorta smoothly roll over from one into another. Other weeks things happen like wild water rafting. This was such a week. Worst thing that happened was that our cute cat got hit by a car and passed away. Some people might say a cat is a cat, others say it was just a pet, and others may cry for him. Truth is that this little cutie was very important to me. When I moved continents I had to leave my cats behind with new friendly owners. And when I arrived in Oz, this cat was waiting for me, rescued by someone that cared about the cat but had no idea how to take care of him. He was about 8 months then, kept indoors and as a young male in puberty very wild. So I was greeted by a strong cat piss odour and a cat that attacked upon each opportunity given. Oh, and they fed him dog food (as the cat ignored cat food). It took me a few weeks to straighten the cat out, train him to use the cat door and be happy with proper cat bits for food and little snacks of tuna or chicken whenever he was behaving particularly well. The cat turned out to be very socialized and a real cutie and he made it a lot easier to get used to my new home. This week I had to say goodbye as someone took him away from us. I feel very very sad.

New Inkscape tutorials

This event also slowed down some designs I was working on. I made a cute paisley motif a while ago for some custom stationery. I figured it would make a good Inkscape tutorial. When I started to write however, the tutorial became unbelievable long. This is mostly due to the fact that I try to write them for beginner Inkscape artists. So lots of hints and tips, while I describe each step. I am still very fortunate that my mate is not good in vectoring, and that he is still trying to learn Inkscape. That makes him the ideal guinea pig. I only mention new tutorials on the homepage of verysimpledesigns.com when they passed his test.

In the end the simple paisley motif appeared to be useful for 3 new tutorials, where each one focusses on a different aspect of pattern creation. The tutorials are published and we are awaiting feedback.

Inkscape Tutorial: Fancy Borders

Inkscape Tutorial: Floral Motif

Inkscape Tutorial: Paisley Motif

Tags: Graphics, Inkscape, Vector