One of the things that enrages me – yes, enrages, as in I feel the urge to pick up my computer and throw it across the room and watch it shatter into a million pieces, knowing full well that my otherwise awesome warranty that I paid close to $300 for will not cover this – about the York website is that it provides no ready access to any contact information. I am trying not to swear, but every time I visit the student services site my mind turns into a minefield of profanity. I begin to sound a like sailor, a pretty sheltered sailor yes, but a sailor nonetheless. And I begin to wish again that I could speak more than just English, because I’ve been told every other language in the world has English beat for searing insults.
But. I am not. Going to degenerate. Into mere. Cussing. Here.
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Sometime during the crush of essays I made a to-do list. It’s a comprehensive list, written in pale pencil letters on a blank piece of printing paper. I made it then, when technically I shouldn’t even have had enough time to eat, because I knew that once I found myself adrift in free time that I’d forget everything I’d intended to do. My mind works in strange and terrible ways. So I make these notes in my agendas, in various notebooks, on the internet, on my clothes to remind me of the things I’ve done so that I remember the things left to do. It’s a specific, perpetually changing placement: a watching of the background forever receding, the foreground forever advancing. A losing battle, but it gives me something to do in the midst of doing and scribbles to mark the doing.
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A bunch of people down at the University of Alberta are hosting the Broad Album Daylight Tour, featuring Amir Sulaiman and BeLikeMuhammad (aka Anas Canon).

So if you’re in the vicinity you should check it out.
Also, I made the site. (:

I’ve been meaning to post some code, mostly for my own reference and mostly relating to WordPress, but wanted first to edit my css to make my code look pretty. In particular, I’ve noticed that an increasing number of people are able to give their code line numbers without additional markup. You can see an example at Miha Hribar‘s site. Continue reading this entry »

I’d emailed my resume yesterday to a company looking for a web designer and received this inexplicable reply this morning:

Last one – very fresh look – may be too fresh

That email was quickly followed up with:

Sorry Fathima I was trying to pass some responses to my boss and you were the last. I’ll get back to you with a proper response soon.

What does that even mean, too fresh?

If he does get back to me, it’ll be because he feels guilty, but I suspect he won’t.
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It’s one of those things I do reflexively, like renewing my library books online. I turn on the computer, connect to the computer, click through a free-charity website, and check my stats. It’s not that I’m expecting much; it’s just a habit.

The thing about StatCounter is it generates graphs that scale to your numbers. So today, I had to blink when I saw a peak on the far left of the graph that had the rest of the graph hugging the x-axis. Continue reading this entry »

Besides being entranced by the photographs on Couloir, I’ve been trying to figure out how it works, mostly because I want to use a PHP-driven method to display the Sri Lanka gallery (coming soon to a site near you). As Scott explains in his portfolio, the system should be one that “makes updates as simple as cropping the photos and uploading them to the server.” Continue reading this entry »

I was reading Oblivio archives when I decided that I’m going to keep my blogging about web design to the ltw site. After all, that makes the most sense – my web design portfolio and my web design techniques would be in one place.

What this means is that I’ll have to create a second blog for ltw. Thing is, WordPress has poor support for multiple blogs. Each blog requires its own installation, and I find that ridiculous.
I still think MovableType is the better CMS, but now that MT is no longer free (though I am allowed to have up to three blogs), I’m hesitant to use it. But I might; it’s still installed.

The portfolio is up, and mostly done. I only need to add the rotating stylesheet now.

It was Shaun Inman’s site that started me on the redesign. (That and the cringing everytime I glanced at the old version of the site.) His influence isn’t at all apparent in the site now, which is just as well. I’ve worried with some of the more recent sites that rather than just being “influenced,” I’m cribbing.
It was the lull in the freelance work that prompted the portfolio. For some time now, I’ve considered opening my own design company, and I guess this is it. It only went up today, so there’s still time to figure out how I’d get paid by prospective clients. Paypal is not an option. Mailed cheques seem unreliable. I dunno; I’ll figure it all out later when the site actually starts to bring in some work.

I still have to check the colour contrasts. Also, not all the sites I’ve done in the last two years are in the portfolio. After a while, I figured I had enough thumbnails up to justify going live. I didn’t want to spend another fortnight taking screenshots.
Speaking of which, I began the redesign on June 16th, and only ended it at dawn today. That’s uncharacteristically long for me, but there were long gaps in between. Justified gaps.

We have three computers in the house. There is the laptop that I have appropriated (it’s really for my mom) and two desktops. Over the years, we’ve shuffled the hardware around a lot. Right now, the upstairs computer has the oldest monitor in the house. We bought it, an LG, when we were in Saudi Arabia, so that makes it at least 6 years old. In the computer world, that’s archaic. It’s practically an heirloom.

Anyway, I’ve been working on my portfolio, soon to be uploaded to likethewind. Everything is going pretty well, though I wish I’d learned PHP like I’d intended months ago; it would automate a lot of things that I have to do by hand now.
What’s not going well is the colour scheme. It’s a basic light green and white colour scheme.
Upstairs, the light green is a hideous, nauseous, neon atrocity that borders on yellow. And yes, I understand this is an old monitor, so I shouldn’t worry too much. But I have a few doubts that I can’t shake off :

1. I’ve done all the designing on the laptop. All it takes is to tilt the screen slightly to totally destroy colour contrasts. This is an issue with all sites and most laptops. What this means is that I can keep angling the screen until I get any site to show decently, and so I have no real guarantee that the colour brightnesses and contrasts of my own sites are actually alright.
2. Not everyone is on the bleeding razor edge of technology – which is perfectly normal. There’s no real reason to keep “updating” your computer every year when it isn’t central to your life. However, this means that there is the possibility that someone will visit ltw with a monitor long past its prime. There’s no reason to subject them to the horror that my site presents itself as in that situation.
3. None of the other sites I visited on the upstairs computer hurt my eyes. They show up fine on all three screens; they’re thrown off only slightly by the LG. So I’m clearly missing something.

And so, as always, I turn to Google and my bookmarks. I unearthed the following resources; hopefully they’ll help me get through this. I need this folio up ASAP.

• excerpt from Chapter 2 of “Web Graphics for Non-Designers” – Using Colour
• The Return of Design – Color Schemes (excellent resource)
• mezzoblue – Colour Schemes – from he of CSS Zen Garden fame.
• And all that Malarkey – Creating colour palettes – uses Macromedia Fireworks MX.