Category: Web Design

Posts in this category are related to web design.

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.

Update

Syllie

Hi All!

It’s been awefully quiet on all blog fronts for a while. I don’t know how it happens but I am sure you’ll know what I am talking about. It shouldn’t be that hard to drop a post every now and again and a bit more regularly but somehow I do not seem to have enough time to do things. That does not mean I am sitting back and taking the Ozzie laid back life-style a bit too literally 🙂

So what have I been up to? Quite a bit actually… First of all I am enjoying my now full time web developer role in one of the better Aussie SEO companies. It offers tremendous opportunities as we are working from home. That means in general that I am actually doing more hours than my contract says – and also that I ‘bring my work home’ all the time. But if you do what you love to do that is not really a burden .. is it? It also means that on a less effective day I am able to shift my work hours and a break for a coffee and some contemplating is not frowned upon. As long as the work gets done that is 😀

It also means that I spent a serious amount of time behind the PC. That has been the case for many years.. but at some point in time I simply did not enjoy doing stuff  ‘after hours’. And that impacts my other interests, such as the Inkscape tutorials that I write for verysimpledesigns.com. Also graphics work in general was getting less attention. If you read this blog before then you’ll know that I was doing some 3D modeling work in Blender. Well the user interface got a make over and I am sorta learning to work with this program again. 3D is awesome, but has a steep learning curve. I am glad I do not need to start at the absolute bottom.

Also a friend of mine decided to get married. In Kauai of all places – it must be one of the most beautiful places of this planet. He asked me if I would design and build the website for their wedding and how could I say no? It would be the perfect wedding pressie too! I started with some simple ideas and we mailed a bit back and forth and before I knew I was also asked to design their wedding invitation. The theme? Aqua and Ivory with a hint of Red – tropical colours in a tropical setting. I was not sure about how ‘formal’ this was all supposed to be but when we talked about it and viewed some examples we decided to go with white orchids with red ribbons against a blue aqua background for the website, and with blue outlines for the invitation. It was a lot of work after hours and it took the larger part of 2 weekends but it was worth it. The bride and groom love the designs and the feedback of the guests is positive sofar. Mission accomplished I’d say.

Change of Weather

Syllie

Finally! Summer is near! The temperatures are slowly going up and for the next few weeks it will be ‘comfortable’ – that is just before it becomes too hot and I need the airconditioner to feel comfy. I am still not used to the Australian weather. Funny thing is that ‘Sydney people’ try to deny that it is cold – many houses do not have heating systems and some of my friends seem to think it is quite normal to sit indoors with your coat on. I miss the comfort of a central heating system on cold days! I have had a serious cold / flu / sinus infection and been sniffing and coughing for weeks. So glad I can work from my own home!

Work-Life-Play

Life here is not really so different as to my life in the Netherlands. Sure the weekends are awesome – bushwalks, beachlife and enjoying a laidback lifestyle – weekdays are business as usual. I really like the work and the complexity is slowly growing. As I wrote in my earlier post – I feel I am a full WordPress developer now. We deliver a few websites a month and are expanding our range of services. I am focussing a bit more on extending skills with particular frameworks such as JQuery. All in all very cool and a job perfectly suitable for a geek girl.

Joomla and Very Simple Designs

I finally found some time to do a major update on our Inkscape tutorial site verysimpledesigns.com. The site runs on Joomla! 1.5 and I was hoping that by now version 1.6 would have been released. Not so – and that might as well be ages away again – so I finally found the courage to update all components to the last available version.

I still need to fix a few things: use of an older version of JComments has resulting in commenter’s names and email adrresses disappearing. Of course I have back-ups so I can restore the table – but one has to do that aye?

I am not sure what is keeping the release of the new version, a new beta version is released every 2-3 weeks and they have carefully mentioned a possible RC1 with the next release. But c’mon – that has been a way too long development cycle! (and yes I am aware it is open source, depending on volunteers etc…). Anyways.. I am working on an overhaul of the template we use on verysimpledesigns.com – for use with Joomla! 1.6. We will migrate the site when the release of Joomla! is production ready. A specific point of focus is to number the steps in a tutorial better to improve readability.

Inkscape

Inkscape 0.48 has been released a few weeks back and an update is in the making. Whilst all the developers work hard on fixing issues – some regression has occurred and the release of 0.48.1 is pushed back a bit. There have been a few cool but not so noticable additions to the program – and I am way overdue in writing a tutorial about that. Gonna try to fit that in next week or so.

More play

So is it all work and no play? Of course not! Like I said – the weekends are for relaxing and enjoying the Australian lifestyle (bushwalks, beachlife, meeting up with friends and of course steaks and such on the barbie).

I also picked up another skill – I did a course in textile printing. The very simple vector designs I create are very suitable for fabric printing and I figured I might as well add that skill to my set. The course ran at the Sydney Community Collegue and was led by a very enthousiastic instructor – Ro Cook. The course comprised of screen printing and relief printing.

In the screen printing part we created our direct stencils by cutting our designs from a a coated material. The results are pretty good – but I must confess that I am not crafty enough to spend 2 hours cutting an intrinsic design from a piece of (coated) paper. So back to automated techniques: we obtained an electronic cutter. At the moment that buy seems to be a failure as the software that drives the machine is not doing its work – it is unable to cut our own created SVGs. An update of the software has been promised a few times and is about to be released (this week). But counting the empty promises sofar I do not keep my hopes up too high.

Oh and tomorrow is the day of the Metallica concert 🙂