Domestic Geek

So, today is the first day that I got to look at my site in that piece of crap Internet Explorer. Yeah, this is why I don't do web design for a living. My site blows in IE (a tiny apology to those of you using IE, but then again, upgrade to a real standards compliant browser and your Internet world will look so much better). Part of me says screw it. IE sucks and don't waste my time getting perfectly valid code to work in a POS browser. Another part of me wants to figure out why it's broken in IE. I'm not sure which part will win, but the battle won't be fought today. I'm going to go surf Ravelry and knit instead. So there, IE. Suck it.

Gah, I am so out of practice with all this web coding stuff — use it or lose it. I've definitely lost it. I spend hours today jacking around with css that wasn't working. My sidebars are a mess, I totally forgot to make sidebar headers, my comments page is nowhere close to done. It'll be wonky for a few days while I mess with it, but since I'm live, perhaps I'll be more inclined to actually get it all fixed.

Just a heads up that things are going to be wonky as I get my Pink October theme back up. Silly me thought I had backed up my theme right before I changed it for Blogathon, but I neglected to grab the style sheet. D'oh. Fortunately, I have a backup from last April, I just need to mesh the right hex color codes in. Be patient. I also promise this theme will not be here for the whole next year.

UPDATE: OK, we are officially PINK for October! The only problems remaining are those that I've always been too lazy to fix (like my comments sidebar). The whole purpose obviously is to bring awareness that October is National Breast Cancer month and to promote education about the disease itself. Head over to the Pink for October site for details and to sign up (once they fix the submission form). Of course, you can still go pink without signing up for the site.

Some days when I'm cruising on stock sites like iStockPhoto.com and the like, I see images and illustrations that caught my eye from the many publications we print. I've decided to get off my duff and learn to illustrate people so that I can get my work onto iStockPhoto and one day come across my work in one of our client's magazines. A weird goal? Maybe. I still think it would be cool, though. Damn, why is illustrating people's faces so freaking difficult?

When I was in design school, the woman that taught our prepress classes was amazing (she owns Phases Design Studio)! A lot of designers really don't get the technical side of things and their eyes kind of glazed over when she talked. She also held people to strict, high standards and that put a lot of people off. After I got over the initial fear of her because of rumors of how mean and unfair she was, she quickly became one of my favorite teachers ever. She has such a wealth of knowledge about how computers worked, prepress issues, design sense, font problems, etc. I used to love picking her brain.

I remember a piece of advice she gave in class one day and it echoed through my mind yesterday as I was dealing with yet another set of problems caused by designers that do not really understand the tools they use. "If you want to be a really good graphic designer, one of your first jobs out of design school should be in a prepress department." I received a similar piece of advice from Joelle over at Moxie Design Studios awhile back regarding being a web designer. She suggested that if a person really wanted to be a great web designer, they should start out in a web production company. Wise women both.

I guess my whole point here is that if you're going to truly master a craft, start out somewhere where there are lots people who have been doing it a lot longer than you and be open to picking up as many tips and pointers as possible. I know my thirst to understand how and why things work and my ability to ask the right questions is gaining me knowledge that, while making me a better prepress employee, ultimately makes me a better designer. It's kind of sad that we don't really have true apprenticeships anymore.