Domestic Geek

Any designer who has been around a while hates certain fonts because of their overuse and their inappropriate use. One of these among the design community is Comic Sans. In fact, I had a CSR last week suggest that as a font I should use for her client's cover. I gently had to steer her away from that particular font. That's why this Achewood comic is so darned funny. [via Moxiegirls]

OK, I'm working on my template and I've hit a little snag. I want to do graphical buttons for my navigation menu instead of text, but I can't figure out a picture to represent a couple of them. Obviously, Home is a house, Gallery is a camera, Contact is envelope, but About and Archives have me stumped. A book maybe for archives? Does that make sense. Mind you, when you hover over the button, it will have text of where it goes, but I'm stuck. Disclaimer I'm thinking of moving out of the nav, but if you got a good idea for that one, I'm all ears.

Of course, these may come to me after a good night's sleep. I had a rotten day at work today and my brain is a little muddy from that. I thought I'd be in a better mood once I got out of there, but the heat today just made me cranky.

How can the weekend be over aleady? Man, I am so happy and excited about how my new design is shaping up that I don't even want to go to work today just to play with it. I have, however, discovered that I really suck (for now) at illustrating people. I need to practice that and get better. I can see it in my mind, I just can't quite transfer it to pixels. No worries.

I went to the coolest presentation on Adobe Photoshop CS3 last night at the Denver Media Group function that was definitely worth the $15 I paid to attend. The presenter was Jay Kinghorn, a local Adobe Photoshop Certified Expert from Boulder. He was very knowledgeable, personable and packed a lot of information into the hour and a half time frame we had. I could've listened to him for hours. I must say I am impressed with how Adobe is developing Bridge and Camera Raw. Having not upgraded to CS2 when it came out, I was really unaware of the capabilities for photo corrections the newer versions provide.

I also got to see a couple of teachers from Platt, a girl I knew from school as well as a former coworker from the ad magazine in Larkspur (one that I don't despise). She was telling me how she and two other designers no longer worked there (2 were laid off and 1 quit). That leaves the original two and one of them had to take a pay cut. I'm trying not to be happy about someone's business floundering, but truth be told I am just a little. I'm so grateful that I'm better off now.

On good work-related new today, on July 1st I am eligible to participate in our 401K plan. w00t! Since they'll match up to 6% of my pay, I am thinking of doing that, but don't know if I can handle that much of my paycheck missing right at the moment. I'll definitely at least have 3% put away. That's like getting a raise right there in the long run. See, I didn't have the remote possibility of benefits at that old company. Speaking of benefits and thus dental, a pretty large piece of bone worked itself out of my gums today. Ick.

There is going to be doing a full day DMG event on September 13th that I would love to attend, however since the head of my department and one of my senior coworkers were talking about going this morning, I doubt they'll let me off for it. I told him I was interested in going and since that event is 3 months away, I'll have to wait and see. I guess it will depend on how busy we are at the time.

OK, I'm off to work on my craft blog for a bit. I totally screwed something up last night and had to get Marcus to revert to an earlier version of my database. D'oh! heh.

I was bored at work yesterday, so I was checking out some of the new features in Illustrator CS3. I'm not entirely thrilled with these new "panels" that are docked on the side, but that may be just getting used to them. I can change them to a more palette type of interface that I'm used to if I just can't make nice with them. There are some cool things that have been added that will really be helpful when I illustrate. For instance, when you hover your mouse over a path's endpoint, a large box appears to make it easier to click on just the right point. That was always the biggest pain with earlier versions. There are some cool color features that I can wait to experiment more with. There's some sort of color scheme thing that I haven't quite figured out, but it looks intriguing. It generates related color swatches based on a color you pick. Very helpful when trying to find complimentary colors for a design. Anyway, if I can sneak in some more time tomorrow, I'll see what else is in there.