Clientelle

Recently I have had the privilege of dealing with some of my first clients. Without a contract, without a face-to-face meeting, proper communication has been difficult. Many of the ideas (mine or theirs) are lost in transit. With a simple answer of "yes" or "I like that one", it's very difficult to know if the client enjoys the whole thing, the font choice, the colours, the layout, yadda yadaa, what-have-you. I have learned the hard way, that without at least an agreement or any sort of a timeline or idea of a finished product, your are absolutely in the hands of your client. I have recently discovered that it needs to be the other way around. You, the designer only know what you, the designer are capable of, what the web is capable of. You, the designer, are the enlightened one. I am an amateur and I will learn.

Productivity and workflow; keep it simple.

So much to do, so little time. Lately I've had to really ramp up my time management skills. I started keeping a rough list, adding each item to Google Calendar so I am constantly reminded of my tasks. When it comes to designing, I've discovered that starting from the beginning is very important; Start with a sketch, and some key points or a brainstorm. Have an idea before you start illustrating or coding. With no goals, I find myself endlessly coding the same parts over and over because I don't know where I'm going. Wandering around like a lost puppy. By starting at the beginning you are allowing yourself a plan. Planning is important. Order is important and I always overlook it, but since I've been keeping track, and starting where I need to, I can get alot more finished in the allotted time.

That is all.

Learning CSS

I seem to be stalling on the CSS portion of web building. I find it the most fascinating. The application of words, letters, symbols, and numbers to make colours and shapes and styles appear. The internet as we know it seems to have taken on a fairly uniform approach; navigation bar across the top, thin header, with a title, content and a sidebar. So many beautiful ways to style things and this is what we're stuck with? It's not all that appealing to the eye, if everything looks similar. My list of CSS skills and tricks keeps growing,  every time I code a page. For example, the if all content is listed in uniform chunks (windows 8 UI style), there's a badass plugin you can use to jQuery to line this stuff up. It's called Masonry. But it's jQuery. I found a neat example that sort of (barely, but quite a lot in principle) imitates this with strictly CSS, and allows your content to sort of think for itself. It involves a little bit of Tetris, and a little bit of nth child.  Using only CSS, you can have "smart" content, where it fills in the gaps and expands to fit in the spaces. #CSStrickoftheday