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.
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3 comments:
Heh, yeah. I remember those IE vs. Firefox/Safari/Opera/etc inconsistencies, they used to drive me absolutely nuts. I did know the margin: 0 (or whatever I wanted it to be) trick, that and a couple of other things were always set to 0 right off the bat.
It always amused me that Microsoft was big on helping create the W3C standards, and then pretty much ignored them in their own browser.
Quark is a great program, and if you get comfortable with it, can do all sorts of amazing things. That's what we used at the Santa Fean to build the whole magazine.
However, if you can get your hands on it, InDesign is a similar program designed to work with all of the Adobe software. (It's an Adobe program, so that makes sense.) We were going to switch to it, but the amount of time/money it would have taken to train everyone to use it—especially the art director—made it difficult enough that we never did.
Congrats on figuring out the gap problem, finally. Mind the gap!
Erica: Yeah, IE is one of the banes of my existence. You know it's a bad program when even simple javascript menus have to have three of four extra "tweaks" at the bottom to "fit bugs in IE."
Liz: I have used InDesign before and didn't like it at all, though to be fair I probably never gave it the time it deserved. I am mostly pretty impressed with Quark so far, though the gaps are already there. I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to change the page size the other day... something no one mentions in the help file or online because it is so self-explanatory, except you can only get to it if you are not editing one of the master templates - which I just happened to be doing at the time. *sigh
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