| WordPress Cheat Sheet | 2:42 pm, August 22nd, 2011
I just found this here and wanted to share with you all:
Handy for when you need to quickly look up that code snippet! (if you have no idea what this is about, these codes are pretty much what you’d use to build custom WP themes. I KNOW THERE’S SO MANY!)
| Ohh so this happened. | 9:59 pm, December 15th, 2010
Attack Of The Style Sheets
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) the governing body that sets HTML, XML, CSS, and other technical standards decided enough was enough with the formatting tags and deprecated them. That means those tags and attributes are marked for deletion in future versions of HTML and XHTML.
The W3C hopes to eventually replace formatting tags with Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) definitions. This meets the goal of separating presentation from structure. In a pure CSS environment, basic HTML tags define paragraphs, lists, headers, etc. and CSS definitions tell the browser how to display them.
But this will never be entirely successful as long as some designers continue to use HTML formatting tags instead of CSS. That’s why the tags are marked for deletion in the future.
Here’s a brief list of the most popular deprecated HTML tags and attributes, along with the style properties that replace them.
Deprecated Tags:
HTML Tag Style Property center text-align:center b font-weight:bold u font-style:italic font font-family:font name
HTML Attribute Style Property align text-align background background-image:url(image) bgcolor background-color hspace padding vspace padding size font-size:
Ho hum. And that is probably why Adobe have changed Dreamweaver around so that we have to use a goddamn freakin stylesheet for every change now. I suppose its not a bad thing as much..its just…HTML TAGS ARE SO CONVENIENTLY EASY!!! Yes I’m just lazy. Whatever.
Anyway I had a most productive evening tonight. I literally have two sticky notes worth of things to get done, and I got through some of them! You have no idea how satisfying it is ticking off stuff that you’ve done. Tonight I:
- Wrote Christmas Cards
- Cleaned out my entire wardrobe and organized everything, including stuff I need to sell
- Cleaned my desk and chucked out random junk
- Organized my books and cleaned up my dresser (remind me- I need to get bookends!!)
- Wrapped presents
- Wrote more cards
- Went to the pharmacist
- Installed Adobe CS-freakin-5 (I have InDesign now- yippy ky yay!)
- Cleaned out my downloads folder (I freed up like….20 gigs of space)
- Updated music on my ipod
- Started on some postcard templates for next year’s project
- Currently touching up some photos!
Hopefully I’ll upload some soon! I have around 400 to get through!
So yeah, look out for those soon.
Should probably sleep now anyways, so here I bring you the shortest horror story in the world:
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.” ~ The “shortest horror story ever written” by Frederic Brown.
Isn’t it amazingly chilling?
| 365 (postcards) | 4:17 pm, December 14th, 2010
Holy crap.
This … could be life changing.
And it could be something which I stop halfway through the year.
Either way….I AM SO DOING THIS.
The project I want to do? Design a postcard every day for 2011. And possibly send them to people I know periodically!!
Using a mixture of mixed media and creative commons images, this will hopefully be possible. I’m hoping it will eventuate though, and seeing as I have like….two weeks to get materials and stuff I can’t wait to start this!
I love Boing Boing for quality links and inspiration like this!
| Brraaaiiinnsss…. | 7:22 pm, December 13th, 2010
So, as you might know, the latest issue of dotdotdash has been released recently.
If you haven’t yet already bought a copy- go now and buy one! It is without a doubt my favourite issue thus far(having read 3 of the 5 issues..haha).
And its on everyone’s favourite topic- food! So that is an added bonus. To be honest, I’m quite surprised there wasn’t more zombies in the issue because that’s what I immediately thought of when I thouht of Feast…but there you go.
Next issue is Jukebox, which should be fun! I have to write a song. And it’s HARD. Songwriting…poetry…is hard in general, especially making it non-tacky/cheesy lol.
I’ve been real busy lately- so much so that I haven’t really had much time to do anything remotely creative in a while. It kinda sucks but I definitely want to do more as I get more time off soon!
Anyway, these are the designs that I did for the last issue of D^3:
Hope you like them!
I’m sad I can’t do more stuff for the next issue coz I’m so busy. 
Oh well….
Oh I also have more photography to upload too! I know I’ve been saying that for like the past few months now but I found a really cool image resizer/rotator so hopefully I’ll get that up and going soon.
| It started with an idea… | 1:42 am, September 24th, 2010
…the kind of idea that stays with you until you get it done.
The kind of idea that makes you stay up til 4am finishing the drawing.
The kind of idea that will be gone FOREVER if you don’t start it immediately.
This new layout…started with that type of idea.
I’ve always loved the concept of clouds and deserts and open spaces, and I hope this kind of complements that. I knew I wanted to draw something with clouds and I wanted a whimsical type feel to it, so I drew a lonely happy robot, floating amongst the clouds over a busy city, fishing for star flowers while watching birds and balloons pass by. Joy!
And I’m not ashamed to say this layout was fueled by tea, gummi bears, instrumental post rock and LINKIN PARK. My in the zone music needs to be as mindless/unobtrusive as possible, and for some reason….listening to either of these things in the background helped me to just do stuff.
Drawing the robot was probably the hardest part, only coz I wanted it to look 3D-ish. I started drawing it pretty late at night, and it was the type of thing that if I didn’t finish it at that specific time, I’d never finish it, and the inspiration/in the zone-ness would be gone by the next day. I woke up and pretty much started working on it again, only something felt different, and I hardly made any changes before completing the rest of the layout. Weird how that happens huh?
I wanted to make the balloons individual image links but that all became too hard and messy so I scrapped that.
I was also going to make this a horizontal layout because it just WORKED in theory because the clouds looked better horizontal than vertical, but decided it got way too messy with the divs and stuff (I hate placing div layers next to each other. It makes things so complicated!). I think the city scape at the bottom definitely helps make this layout though because this totally looked like something was missing without it.
I’m also bringing back the lens flare. Yeah. Go me. Next thing you know, I’ll be using Papyrus for an egyptian themed layout. Hah!
One thing I’m really looking forward to is APNGs, or animated PNGs. I know Firefox already supports them but other browsers don’t and its kinda annoying. I don’t know of any programs that make aPNGs either. I wanted to make some of the stuff in the header animated, but GIFS just don’t cut it with their 256 colours!
I have some new sketches and paintings to add on here too. And photos….haha. Soon my darlings.
Anyway, hope you people like the changes.
If you liked the old layout better, don’t fret. You can switch the themes at the bottom!
| Brainfuzzled | 4:04 am, September 17th, 2010
So it’s pretty late, and I just spent way too long on ebay…but..um..yeah. God I’m tired. My brain isn’t even registering words properly, but I still have to brush my teeth AND throw Meeko out.
I need to sell so much stuff on ebay. And apply for jobs.
But first, I need to vector this picture. I have like one day to do it. More like….5 hours. And I don’t want it to look like shit. It’s for an ad for dotdotdash which I had finished AGES ago, but now, one day before the deadline, turns out I need to vector SIX LINKED HANDS and just insert it into the ad. And change the font at the top, and make the text bigger. I have just been way too busy to even start it and it’s kinda worrying because I don’t want it to be subpar but when I vector something is has to be fucking PERFECT and so I usually spend at least few days just tweaking the paths and stuff. But I have a few hours and….asknflafajrefbjlrdsfbemrs.
The next issue looks so delicious though. If you didn’t already know, it’s on food and there are some pretty cool photos and such in there. I personally like my designs for this issue a lot more than the other one…..I think I’m starting to find my style. 
Which is rather satisfying.
This might be short notice, but we are a few pages short so there are FREE TWO PAGE AD SPREADS on offer.
You read right.
FREE TWO PAGE AD SPREADS.
You have to mail me quick though- preferably before 7pm TODAY!! I mean you can’t get much better than this. This would usually cost like….~400 dollars or something? And it’s pretty good exposure. If you have something you’d like to advertise, just mail me quickly quickly quickly so I can get a 2 page ad together and send it off.
Oh also- if you have a local band or know of a local band who would like exposure, dotdotdash is collaborating with local Perth music news op SpaceShip News for some cool musicalities. It will be part of the Jukebox issue for dotdotdash which is coming out early next year, and will include a CD featuring local musicians. How exciting.
It’s already September and I’ve hardly made any headway into my visual diary. I have started watercolour painting though and it’s so relaxing. It’s really hard to control though – I love all those dream like watercolour art but for how effortless it looks, it is actually really hard to blend colours together and achieve a dreamy like painting without making it look like a smudgy, muddy mess. Heh. I’m just having fun and learning!
The Magnetic Fields is inspiring me lately. They are such an amazing band. I frickin LOVE All my little words. And Sweet Lovin Man. And Underwear. And A Pretty Girl is Like… And everything. B) EVERYTHING. Stephen Merritt is a genius.
I really want to make some cards for my birthday party, and this christmas party I’m having with my friend Cindy. It’s so much FUN. I still haven’t really organized either though- due to me being kinda antisocial to any kind of party on my part. I should probably get onto that soon! It will probably only involve food and cake though.
Ok now it’s incredibly late and I should go to sleep.
I will leave this post with this:
Inspired by the Lady of Shalott. Love the poem, love the legend!
This dude has done some other amazing work- I love this one. And this one.
They’re all pretty incredible!
| You, Appearing | 5:27 am, August 24th, 2010
Finding the time and motivation to do things is hard. Especially when you have the whole internet, books and tea at your disposal.
I think I’ve done quite a bit today in terms of creating things though, and I actually feel quite lucky to have so much stuff around me to keep me inspired.
I still haven’t added much photos and stuff on here because it’s taking me a while to compress them all. It takes a lot of time! I’ve been busy with a lot of other things but because I have so much free time this week, I’ll probably get a lot of stuff done
I got some d3 submissions to design for the next issue, and they are pretty awesome. I’m doing 3 poems and 1 short story so far, and they are all quite inspiring. I love having the free reign to do whatever I want with the page layout and learning a lot at the same time- it’s a really fun experience! It’s gotten me thinking- if I were to do this as an actual career in the future, I think I’d probably want to do print work over web because I love having the finished product at the end…and seeing the process it made from screen onto a piece of paper. It’s also a lot easier for me to design something when I know how the page is going to relate to everything else…if you know what I mean. I’m working on creating actual illustrated landscapes but it’s…a process. I actually did 2 designs yesterday for the poems, and I LOVE how they’ve turned out, but unfortunately I can’t show them off until the next issue’s been published!
I’ve actually been reading some other people’s techniques on Illustrator lately, and they’re quite interesting. I think I should make use of the paintbrush, pencil and art brushes more often. It’s really cool learning new tips and tricks about using the program though- it makes drawing things so much easier!
Post apocalyptic art is my favourite kind of art and it always amazes me to see what other people come up with. I was looking at this last night, and I absolutely love some of the stuff on here. The traintrack leading in to the ocean totally reminds me of Spirited Away(and how I really want to rewatch that!). The abandoned train station is also pretty cool. There’s something about train stations that evokes such a feeling of… eerieness. The ability to get away from everything but in reality everything is hopeless kind of feeling?
I made whoopie pies today(they’re like cake cookies) too. Apparently they are an Amish phenomenon. Heh. I was really hungry last night and found the recipe for them on some site. I decided to make them in my sleep, and as soon as I woke up it was BAM! Cake cookie time. They were chocolate flavoured with peanut butter frosting and pecans/coconut/choc chips in the middle. SO YUMMY. But pretty rich! I’ve got loads left over!! And now I’m reallly reallly full.
I also have this drawing which I want to get done by the end of this week- it looks amazing in my head but I hope it’ll look cooler on screen. I actually tried to start it last night but I had a huge major creative block and just did not know HOW. So…maybe tonight. Or I might just sketch it and scan it in.
I want to go for a long bike ride too. Maybe tomorrow, to the lake or maybe even IKEA 
I just really need to enjoy nature for a bit.
I made a better version of the IKEA video because they for SOME REASON they could not figure out how to play the file from the DVD AND USB STICK at the launch party so my manager wants the video by Friday to show to everyone at the daily morning meeting. Hurrah! Luckily that is all over and done with. I just need to give that to them tomorrow and hopefully that will be that!
