Turn on your favorite song and listen to it for a few minutes. What do you notice about it? Do you feel carried away on a journey through the ups and downs of the song? Ever wonder how songwriters do that?

Let’s take a step away from music now. Go to your favorite design and look at it. Is your eye pulled to particular areas on the page? Do you feel drawn more to one area or another? How is it accomplished? Perhaps through the use of arrows, curves, or other design elements.

This is flow. Ya’ve either got it or ya don’t! This is how we’re going to make a design really sing.
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How the hell did I get here, and where am I going?

Sometimes I sit back and wonder about the journey I took to become a web designer. I started out as that kid you pay $20 to for something quick because they know a little bit about computers. I loved graphics, and making images. I would take poetry and images, and combine them through blends, with textures and other things I experimented with. A friend of mine from childhood knew a little bit about how to get started with a website; she had me going with Geocities in very little time. I was able to post my writing, my graphics, and explore a world I was only just beginning to learn about. Read more »

One of the biggest sins our society has made is its creation of lies. Lies and slander, even, concerning the educational system in particular. We tell our students that they are preparing themselves for life by getting their college degree, and that by getting this slip of paper after four years of work they will be able to step out immediately into the real world. Just check out the University of California sites – their way of enticing students to pay a higher price for their education is to show very exceptional students who are being hired right out of school.

The problem I have with this is my own experience. I have already learned for myself that the world does not work this way. Part of why I have chosen to attend college in a field other than design is that I know that yes the degree helps, but I also know that design is a very difficult field to enter into, especially without a very strong resume. Read more »

It feels strange changing the header on my emails, but that’s what this week has turned into: change.

This week, I am moving six hundred miles away from Las Vegas, Nevada, into the city of Sacramento, California, in part to further my education in software engineering (I am learning this to further my programming skills; I will still be designing) as well as to look into more design-type jobs.

While Las Vegas has plenty of jobs in my area of expertise, I am looking forward to the change. It is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and now that I finally have the opportunity, I’ve definitely become terribly excited over it. I will be leaving Las Vegas Thursday morning and stopping in Fresno for the night, and then continuing onward and upwards to Sacramento the following Friday morning. Read more »

I rarely make my political beliefs public, as I feel that they are something which I hold close to my heart. Nevertheless, I am always willing to take on any project, no matter how controversial it may be – and that includes political or religious projects. My work with Forward Focus Media can only be described as one word: rewarding. Honestly, I have greatly enjoyed the month of work which I put into the site, and the month which I worked closely with the people behind the company.

That being said, I’m quite sure that they give their clients the same amount of brilliant treatment. If your political beliefs happen to fall under “libertarian” or “conservative” and you happen to be politically involved, this Alabama-based firm can certainly help you out – but how? Why not check out their site to find out!

Specifically, my work with this site was to customize a pre-built WordPress template. The original design was very nice, I must admit, but I saw many ways in which it could be changed in order to better suit the site’s purpose. From coding an RSS puller in order to display their latest posts to editing a Twitter widget, the facelift to this design was actually pretty large; I may as well have written the theme myself from scratch. However, Forward Focus had already selected this template, and I noted that certain things could be thrown out altogether and that certain things could be redone. We started small, working on the graphics you see – the logo was provided, but I did create all of the graphics such as the Twitter and Facebook graphics (after all, graphics were how I was pulled into design in the first place).