Friday, January 30, 2009

Never Knowing

You can spend your whole life obsessed with something. You can avidly read every book you can get your hands on regarding the subject between the ages of 5 and 15. You can continue to learn more and invest large amounts of time in this thing for significant portions of your adult life. You can teach other people to love it, you can learn repeatedly that you know less than many but more than some. You can own (and often study recreationally) a gigantic encyclopedia on the subject. You can have long, informed conversations on different points of strength and weakness with other enthusiasts and learn to recognize subtle characteristics in various specimens at a glance...

...and then sometimes out of the blue you will see an ad selling a distinctive breed of horse you never knew existed, only a few hundred miles away.

Life is just so vast. I suppose in some ways it is refreshing to know you can never run out of things to learn.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Relief

The feeling you get when you complete three websites, mail your wedding invitations and see that the physical manifestation of the book you designed looks good, all in one day.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Drawing Comparisons

Skills I acquired getting my BFA in printmaking that proved to be quite useful whilst making my own wedding invitations:
  • the ability to quickly and neatly tear one very large sheet of paper into many smaller pieces of paper
  • the mindset to be able to focus on a tedious, repetitive process for a ridiculously long period of time

Things about making my own wedding invitations that reminded me very much of being a printmaking student:
  • getting ink all over my hands
  • giving pep-talks to inanimate objects
  • a feeling of deep exhaustion coupled oddly with hunger and a sore back that all combine into a sensation of spiritual desolation
  • becoming progressively less and less exacting about page margin standards

Things about being a printmaking student not at all like making my own wedding invitations:
  • having no responsibilities other than making prints
  • having at least a semester to accomplish anything worth looking at

Things about being a printmaking student I missed very much whilst making my own wedding invitations:
  • a tear bar
  • being surrounded by a whole slew of other people who, like me, secretly really do care an awful lot about page margins

Questions raised both by getting my BFA in printmaking and making my own wedding invitations I suspect will never be answered to my satisfaction:
  • why does the slovenly test-print on a scrap always come out better than the carefully-prepared-for final run on good paper?
  • why am I doing this?

Things I might have done had I gotten a degree in something more practical than printmaking:
  • landed a real job after graduation
  • hired someone else to make my wedding invitations

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Getting Professional

Something I designed is available for sale on amazon. Trippy...

Although I must admit, after over 12 hours of working on our wedding invitations today, I'm feeling rather sick of designing things and more than a little battered.

Kind of like the first envelope of the day.

The one we tested the printer with...

... multiple times...

(names and addresses obscured to protect identities)

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Under the Weather

Brian and I have both been feeling a little sub-par the last few days. However, we're trying a classic remedy, and feeling rather better.

Yay for Hot Toddies.


In other news, we started production of our wedding invitations today, and I built the accompanying website. It still needs to be filled in, but it's a start, anyway.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Sleeping Higher

Yesterday Brian and I finally reached the end of our musical-sleeping-arrangements game. We ordered a bed frame at the same time we ordered the sleep-number bed, but the frame took longer to arrive as it came through a local shop with deliveries only every couple of weeks. Several large, heavy boxes arrived yesterday, however, and after spending some time wielding an allen wrench, a screw-driver, a rubber mallet and an electric drill, the frame is assembled.

So, after many months, we are up off the floor. I must say, there is something pretty wonderful about waking up and stepping out of bed, instead of waking up and climbing all the way to your feet to get the day going.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Counting Z's

Most of you who read this blog know about my weird joints. Really, most of Flagstaff knows about my weird joints, thanks to Liz and her publishing connections a few years ago. :)

And while my weird joints have been an excellent source of amusement, disbelief, awe and disgust for many years now, since the loose tendons run through not just one goofy hand, but my whole body, as I have gotten less youthful they cause more difficulty than entertainment. My feet and arches are a big pain, and lately I have to wear either Birkenstocks or supportive insoles in my other shoes. Also not so great is sleeping. Since my tendons offer very little support to my body, once I fall asleep I tend to collapse in on myself in odd compositions and often wake up uncomfortable.

Brian, being over six feet tall and under 150 lbs, has sleep challenges of a different sort. Many beds don't do a good job with that particular arrangement of weight to distribute. He tends to sag in the middle and go through the night as if lying in a hammock.

Add my joints and his length to either my old beaten-down futon or his old beaten-down mattress and you get problems. The last few months the two of us have been trying and discarding all manner of sleeping arrangements to no avail, and becoming increasingly geriatric in the process - waking up and comparing aches and pains like a couple in their 80's.

So, finally we decided to do something beyond shuffling mattresses, futons and box-springs in and out of the bedroom and up and down the basement stairs. We did a lot of research in the form of lying around in various stores and talking to friends and relatives about what they sleep on. Finally, we made a big decision.

In all honesty, we would never have initially purchased a Sleep-Number bed, simply because Brian and I are both the ornery types who react to advertising by not wanting to buy what someone is trying to sell us. But we heard good reports from a number of very real people we know, and after much deliberation decided what he needs for his problem and what I need for mine are probably at different ends of the mattress spectrum. After visiting a Select Comfort store a few times and doing some more lying around, we made the purchase.

Yesterday two square boxes arrived. I spent half an hour or so so putting the mattress together, and last night Brian and I selected our numbers (he chose 85 and I chose 40) and drifted off. He slept like a rock. I didn't sleep as well, (the insomnia I suffered earlier in life is only currently kept at bay by a very particular arrangement of sleeping variables - so changes are not easy for me) but more importantly I got out of bed this morning without joint discomfort anywhere.

So, we are hopeful. And while in general I believe buying things won't solve your problems, sometimes I guess it will.

Thursday, January 08, 2009

The Most Useful Things I've learned This Week

So all of a sudden my little freelance graphic design side business has transformed (temporarily, I'm sure) into a full-time job. I've been designing cycling garments, building a site about students studying in Italy, compiling a book for some Hawaiian archaeologists, and acting as the "coder" for a site for a life coach.

One thing that's a little funny about how I've had more or less continuous website design work since midway through college is that none of my formal education has ever included any instruction on anything electronic. I think the last time I had a class on the subject was "computer lab" in 7th grade, where we mostly played the Oregon Trail on old macs with monolithic monitors that could display about 8 colors. I never even had to suffer through a unit on Frontpage or Word in college.

Luckily, most things about the digital world seem to come (relatively) easily to me, but there are times I feel my lack of formal education in the little, fundamental buildings blocks that I often skip over in my crash courses in teaching myself to do things like type out css and design things in complex programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

For instance, last weekend I discovered the "warp" function in Photoshop. Sure, I'd seen it listed in the little pop-up menu millions of times, but I'd never taken the time to get to know it until I had to wrap lines around the contours of clothing. And can I just say this: cool!

The other golden tidbit I recently picked up makes me adore css even more than I already did. I have hated (and no, hate is not too strong a word - sometimes I'm surprised I've never burned out a monitor with my eyes in the midst of some of my impotent coding furies) the way certain tags (notably p and h1, h2, h3, etc.) cause a little gap to appear above them. In firefox. But not IE. I might just put in here that inconsistent gaps are the perfectionistic designer's nightmare.

Anyway, today I found myself staring at a page in which this gap was simply unacceptable and none of the numerous tricks I've developed to circumvent the problem were effective. So, I finally consulted the all-knowing Google with my problem, and it told me about something incredible.

p (or h1, etc.) {margin: 0px;}

I typed these few characters into my style sheet, and the gaps that have plagued me for years simply disappeared.

*sigh... it hurts a little to think of the hours and emotional energy I've wasted not knowing that.

Anyway, in other news I'm playing with QuarkXPress for the first time. So far it's only made me want to shoot myself once or twice - but I can already see the potential in its powerful combination of elements from Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Publisher. Unfortunately, I'm sure I'm going to inadvertently skip over a few fundamental elements on my push to get the project done. Oh well. It'll give me some blog material in a few years, I guess.

Friday, January 02, 2009

Home, Sweet Home

After a lovely vacation in AZ, I must say I am more than a little happy to be back in Iowa City. I have now lived in this house for longer than I've lived anywhere else since I left for college, and have lived with Brian for longer than I've lived with any non-family person. This house is definitely the first place that has really started to feel like my own home, and as much as I love seeing my family and the house I grew up in, that is no longer where my life resides. It may be 50 degrees colder outside here than in Tucson, but somehow this has become a cozy and relaxing place for me to be.