Over the past couple days I’ve been redesigning my website.First, I made a design for my website in Illustrator that I’m happy with. What’s better is that I was able to implement it fully in a matter of minutes because of the clean template structure I used previously. I had wanted for some time to add some flare to the site, but not to do too much, since I would never want to detract from the content. I hope this design is successful, I don’t think it’s too flashy. Please let me know what you think. Next, I made a lot of minor appearance changes and cleaned up a good amount of the code, fixing up a few sections that had had minor bugs for some time. This is mostly done, but I’m still not happy with the video playback JavaScript. It works fine in FireFox but InternetExplorer shows … Read more…
Valid XHTML Transitional
July 29th, 2007
I switched jonraasch.com, yogaenergyheal.com and artbyanes.com over to XHTML transitional. Validation wasn’t too hard: since I naturally code pretty well with proper nesting and lowercase tags, and I use mainly floated divs and CSS, I only had to close a few image tags and entities. XHTML makes the code tighter than HTML does, and clean code is something I am focusing more and more on these days. Plus now all three sites can be viewed on blackberries! (who cares hehe)
Adobe CS3
July 19th, 2007
I’m up and running with CS3. It’s not too much different, sadly, but it’s awfully weird to see “Adobe Flash” and “Adobe DreamWeaver”. The only thing that seems to have changed is some better integration between Illustrator and Flash (which is really awesome and something I’ve wanted). Besides this, some aspects of it are pretty annoying. In Illustrator, you can’t scroll through the fonts like you used to by just pressing up and down, instead you have to click the bar and click the next one, it really disrupts my workflow. Also I can’t find an easy way to change the stroke weight in Illustrator. If anyone knows a way to easily do either of these things please let me know.A friend of mine told me that I should write code in the editor of DreamWeaver because of its php … Read more…
Mac Crossover
July 9th, 2007
Well I finally broke down and bought a brand new MacBook. I’m a lifetime PC user, but with the CS3 beta looking pretty nice, I decided that it was time to make the cross-over. Now, I’ve always been able to use a Mac but I love being able to really learn the OS like you can only do when you own a machine (I’m always a little more careful if it doesn’t belong to me 😉 )
The adjustment to MacOSX has been surprisingly easy. I’m really liking the OS actually, especially dragging programs from the .dmg file to the applications folder to install them, and being able to save preference changes without restarting applications. It’s so much easier! Also I really like how it mounts everything. I kept asking my friend what he uses to mount disc images with on Mac and he … Read more…
Launched YogaEnergyHeal.com
June 28th, 2007
About a week ago I started work on YogaEneryHeal.com. The site is relatively small, so I opted to go with plain old HTML pages for the majority of the pages. The only php is on the article page, which is a switch to make coding easier, and the contact page in order to process the form.
Overall I wanted the site to be very simple and to have a soothing appearance. I got some great photographs from their photographer and even one that I incorporated into the header (at first I didn’t notice how low res the photos were, and I ended up working with one of them, ugh).
There was a registered trademark of another company that we were using on the site, which set back our launch date by a couple days. Although I followed the trademark specifications of the client, there were several … Read more…
Photo Editing Gig
May 30th, 2007
For the past couple months I’ve been working a photo-editing job, working on old family photos for an estate. The work is pretty interesting, and I really like my coworkers. We do crazy amounts of scanning and then have only a few minutes to retouch each photo. It’s really helping me get faster with Photoshop, and a lot of the photos are very old, and therefore really interesting.
I’ve also been working for the past couple days on an illustration of Kate to give her for her birthday. It’s an important one, so I’m spending extra time perfecting all the vectors in Illustrator. I also made a pretty cool pattern for the background. She already knows that I’ve been working on it, so it’s ok for me to talk about, but I can’t upload it until I actually give it to her, you know, surprises and all.
Blog Ho!
May 25th, 2007
So my friend told me that it would be a good idea to keep a blog. Blogging has always seemed to be sort of a strange thing to me, like people talking to themselves. But he said it would be good to show potential clients what I’ve been up to, and also to keep records for myself of my learning process. Sort of a combination of talking to myself and to other people.
Well, here goes, I doubt if anyone is reading this, but if you are, I hope you enjoy it.
