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How about a nice cup of standards?When going into design, the majority of students are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They were the kid who was always drawing and painting, the one whose parents probably covered their fridge in water colors. So, they would certainly think I’m crazy to say they should also program.

However, design is not art.

There, I said it.

One of the most common misconceptions I receive from my family is that I am in some shape or form an artist. While I do illustrations (such as the one pictured in this post – which, by the way, was inspired by this Adobe Illustrator coffee cup tutorial), I do not consider myself an artist. Granted, I am currently working toward a degree in software engineering, with design as my secondary major (and the way I put the food on the table), but this is why I have come to the conclusion that programming is an invaluable skill to any designer. Read more »

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Choices in Design

June 24th, 2009

Form and functionality should go hand in hand, just like a rose's designToday, I looked at my design on a Dell monitor whose resolution is 1024 x 768. I was surprised at how cluttered my design had become; the original aspect of the design was to remove the clutter, and make the design itself one which was very sleek and elegant, similar to my older design in which there were four navigation choices, and one place for content.

Well, allow me to clarify. I like the top of the site; the choice of very simple horizontal navigation and a central logo. I like the front page, with its “Welcome” written in a sans-serif and a pulled title and 200 characters from the latest post in my blog. Read more »

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Code Push!

June 23rd, 2009

Finally!

I’m finally happy to announce that I was able to send live the code I’ve been hashing and dreaming up for the site is now live. You can see a footer now on every page, in addition to a few other minor changes to the site. Also, this past weekend we upgraded to Wordpress 2.8, and activated Akismet in order to control the spam comments we receive.

It feels very good to update the code for the site. As it stands, it was getting pretty stale, and I’m one who always tries to keep things up-to-date. Granted, we weren’t necessarily out-of-date, so much as there were many changes that I felt needed to be done, namely tweaking the comments page and adding in the footer. This site will always be an on-going project for me; as should all designer’s sites. Read more »

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Mac Vs PC

June 10th, 2009

Mac is great for design I am a Mac person. However, before I entered the world of Apple, I was a PC person.

I was introduced to Mac through Dre, who manages the server-side issues of this site. I wanted a computer I could do development and design work on, yet at the same time use casually.

Frankly, once you go Mac, you never honestly go back. Read more »

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So, I’ve recently begun to work in an office once again, as opposed from home.

I can’t complain. In many ways I prefer to work in an office; instead of having to shoot off emails, for the most part I can just lean over to the next office and say whatever I need, request whatever I need, et cetera, in addition to being able to see things as they happen or from the other person’s screen. Read more »

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