About a design

I'm calling it doodle-design, or notebook-design. The various icons, and hand drawn dood-dads around the site resemble the notes I take in meetings, at the coffee shop, in my backyard sketching out a new patio, etc. This blog is both my doodle area, my experimental canvas, and a place I hope to educate myself as well as others in practicing my writing (note: we'll get to my writing focus in a post soon to come). I will post writings, tutorials, photos, screen casts, callcasts (aka podcasts but lowfi), links, audio, graphic design, drawings, etc.

Templates make blogging boring

For those who venture out to customize your template - I applaud you. I realize it's not easy to customize your own template, but I'm a proponent in GYHD (getting your hands dirty) and I feel overall the web as a creative visual canvas is easily neglected these days thanks to the blogging for dummies apps we have at our finger tips (tumblr, wordpress, blogger, etc). Your content makes you original, content is king, but your appearance sets you apart.

Yes, I do understand that we may not all have the time, or the design chops, to crank out awesome graphical work. But we all can get a little creative with just css/xhtml. But in art class did you teacher sit you in front of an empty canvas and ask, "You can either create your own painting or pick one from the wall?" The very least we should all do is try to customize our layouts to generate some form of uniqueness. A freakin photo of yourself is enough sometimes. Just do something. Is my design here perfect - hellz no. But it's my starting point, my canvas. I expect to evolve it, fix it, tend it.

Furthermore, if you're fighting for eyeballs (if that's your bag) then a custom template is an easy way to grab someone's attention. It comes down to first impressions, right? I already know that by neglecting the IE users I'm making a poor first impression. Hmm, that leads me to my next point...

This design isn't complete

Let's get that straight. I know for a fact that this site looks like doo-doo in IE. Sorry IE people. I'll get to the fixes soon. In the meantime I decided to annoy the hell out of you with a javascript alert on page load asking you to use an alternative browser — which is a great example of disgusting and offensive user experience that I am strongly against. So why then? Well, I made that choice at 3am and I'm sticking to it. Ok, but really, why? Fine. I wanted to give myself a good reason to not neglect updating the design issues in IE. Knowing that alert exists will keep my arse to the grind to fix the issues asap (and maybe it'll make a few people switch over to Firefox).

I kinda miss not having an RSS reader

Ok, I really don't miss it. I'm a more productive being with my google reader account. But, people don't read your blog on your blog. The read your blog in their rss reader of choice, their email, or their "homepage" (ala igoogle, netvibes, etc). So all that design work you put into your blog is wasted. Jk. Not all the time. For me, when I find a post of interest, I hop on over to the original site. I enjoy the reading experience on the site better, just like I enjoy reading a paperback book vs the pdf version. I also like to read comments and participate in the conversation which lends itself to navigating over to the permalink. Not sure if most people do that, but I'd like to think so. Before RSS though, back in the day, I visited a lot more sites. Or at least it feels like I did.

Fugly

Next! Don't look at me I'm hideous. I'm referring to my html/css. In my late night marathon to publish this blog I slapped together this layout. It's no excuse, but it is an excuse. Err... I hate excuses so slap me hard and let me go back and do it right. To that end I hope on documenting my css/html techniques here on my blog to both help me better educate myself as well as maybe help someone else along the way.

Evolution

This design will change. Plain and simple. For example, right now it's left aligned. I may place it in a container and center it. Who knows?! Those sketches for icons - I like them now but I may pull them out. Day by day my friend. Evolution is a good thing.

Knowing the issues

For a site not being complete, I know there are issues. Where's the search? What do those icons mean? I also know there are feature I want to implement. There are widgets I want to build, and changes I need to make to better the overall experience. I know some exist, but if you find others — let me know please.

Lesson learned

Rushing something supports the garbage in/garbage out theory. Overall, I'm happy with the product for it's .1 version. That doesn't mean it's anywhere near the quality I want it to be. Honestly, I'm just happy to be blogging again. Thanks for reading.