Month: August 2011

Design Inspiration

Syllie

You know what? I think the hardest thing to do is to design something for yourself. As much as a doctor fails to follow his own advise or a builder keeps his own place in shape!

I REALLY want to change the design of verysimpledesigns.com. I created a new and fresh logo. And yes it still will be purple.. I like purple. But then…

Joomla is currently at version 1.7. There seems to be an update for every component I use but one.. *sigh* .. update or not to update… what replacement to use??

Do I change my menu from vertical to horizontal? I want to use sliders to save some real estate and present recent Inkscape tutorials in a bit more convenient way. I like the web 2.0 glossy horizontal web styles. I build many of those for our clients. And they all look good! But if you have heaps of content.. the centre part is a bit of an empty block. And I have a LOT of content, just consider the length of my tutorials. Horizontal? Vertical? Horizontal?

I do need to update the stylesheet. I used one that came with a free template and there are many minor beauty flaws in it. One of the things that I should have corrected straight away is to put a numbered style in place. That makes the tutorials so much more readable. But that also means that I have to go through all the tutorials and update the styling to make it look GOOD.

So back to square one.. redesign or refresh? Omg.. deadlock… I need some inspiration, motivation and someone needs to kick my but.

Waiting in Anticipation

Syllie

I am currently in one of those moods… lots of plans and unable to start with any of them. I got some new domains to work on, with the idea to use them to distribute some of my graphics for creative purposes (cutting, crafting and whatever one sees fit). Somehow I cannot seem to finish my website designs and bring the sites live.

Inkscape 0.48.2 has been build, but not yet “formally released”. Waiting on that too… there is not much going on at VerySimpleDesigns.com and that has to change too. The site still has a decent amount of visitors, even with no content changes since last February. I feel a bit guilty about that too… I created some cool prim colour filters and never shared them, I even created a cute design for a tutorial with these filters and never published it. I just got to kick myself into creative mode I guess…

Then Joomla! version 1.7 was released. VSD runs at 1.5 and I have been planning to update the site and give it a fresh look for a long time. Some of the components I use are not available for version 1.7 and one of the most important ones had to do with SEO. There is an update now and I am currently testing the components to see if I can update the site soon. I am looking into the styling too, as the site mainly features tutorials and I would like to have a bit more control on numbering of steps in a tutorial. It needs a bit of rethinking but it is cool to work on.

I have picked up 3d modeling and rendering again – slowly – but also that brings a lot of fun. It is just that I have too many things I want to do .. how to fit that in into just a 24 hr day? 🙂 Ultimately I want to bring out models as content creator for the 3d community – but I am still a long way off from sharing anything worthwile.