Good News. Bad News.

What do you want first? The good or the bad? Let’s go with the bad.

The bad. So, it’s the weekend and I’m just hanging around the house. It starts to rain, and then I hear thunder, so the little meteorologist in my head tells me that a storm is coming. I head to my room to shutdown my computer and switch off the power cord, but, stupid me, I switch the power cord before the computer finishes shutting down. I didn’t think anything of it because I have done it before, so I just went on my way.

About an hour later, I no longer hear rain, and the sound of thunder is slowly fading into the distance, so that little, genius meteorologist tells me that the storm has passed. I head back to my room and turn on my computer, fire up Internet Explorer, and it freezes. No biggie! Not yet, at least.

To make a very long, arduous, and frustrating story short, IE6 no longer works on my computer. It simply freezes, if not as soon as I open the browser, then a few Web pages later. I have been troubleshooting over the last few days, with help from the great minds over at the SitePoint Forums, but a solution is yet to be found. I’m sure you’re asking yourself, “uh, why not use another browser?” Well, the answer is that I am (Mozilla), but I’m very tense and won’t feel relaxed until I know that everything is back normal.

The good. The Get the Look design guides are in the process of being made over. Exciting, huh?! Here is a list of some of the changes, all of which are intended to either (1) make the guides easier and nicer to use, or (2) improve the guides from a content and helpfulness standpoint.

• New headers and borders, which improve the overall look and usability of the guides
• 50px wider, giving more breathing room for the content, thus making the guides easier to use
• Cleaner layout of the content, overall
• A new color section that will include suggested colors from the 216 web safe color palette
• Updated techniques and a couple new “Putting it all togethers”

The new guides should be posted to the site within the next couple weeks, so keep an eye out!

Right and Wrong

A few months ago, when the grunge look was at a peak, I downloaded some grunge brushes for Photoshop and decided to experiment with the look. I am a fan of the dirty style, but it was never something that came naturally to me, so I decided that I would open up Photoshop and practice for a while, just to see what I came up with.

After some time, what you see above is what I had created. Not a terrible first try, but not the most original. I had basically just messed with the photo, stamped every grunge brush I had, and added some color. I was quite proud of what I had come up with, and liked the fact that it used bright colors, which gave it a touch of my own style. I saw the colors as a good contrast to the dirtiness of the photo, and, overall, they made it reflect my style and personality.

I was so excited that I had created a so-so grunge piece that I hopped right over to a certain graphics forum, which will remain unnamed, and posted the design in the gallery forum.

A few days later I checked back and, to my disappointment, the thread had not been filled will compliments or critiques, but with condescension and disgust: “What are you doing? Grunge designs should not use bright colors. You should have used dark, dirty colors;” “The bright colors do not match the grunge style. They ruin it;” and “You still need a lot more practice with the grunge look. You obviously do not understand what grunge means.”

To make things worse, these unconstructive criticisms were not being made by random users, but by the moderators of the forum. I made my rebuttals, but they were quickly dismissed with an elitist tone.

This brings me to my point. Who were they to say that there’s a right and wrong in design? Sure, there are design principles, but that’s not what I am talking about. I’m talking about flat out experimentation with style, texture, and color. Sure, if I had said, “This is supposed to look very grungy. What do you think about it,” I would have expected the comments that were given (of course, in a friendlier fashion.) But I did not ask that. I simply asked what they thought about “this piece I just came up with.”

Design is constantly evolving, and if we stick to the same rules and listen to the people that tell us what design should be, then we are denying ourselves the great feeling that accompanies experimentation and progress. The entire process of trial and error is how mankind discovers new things, and that includes new mixtures of styles to create new styles and new styles beyond those. To say that design, excluding principles, is wrong, is just wrong.

Catching Up

AdamPolselli.com has finally made its way to a new, more stable server, so I will be able make updates on a daily basis now. For example, the Get the Look section of the site has finally been completed, and I will work on the Portfolio and Photography sections over the next week. For now, here are some more noteworthies:

If you’ve ever wondered just how many blogs there are out there, or just how many blog entries are created every hour, wonder no more. The World as a Blog is a very cool little device that shows blogs being posted in nearly real-time, with only a 3-mintue delay when it’s at its worst. At times it can seem a bit sketchy, so I’m not exactly convinced that it’s a credible blog-tracking machine, but if it is, it’s pretty damn cool!

The person behind zlog recently posted a link to an article that explains how to choose a good password. It’s a great, detailed article that will make you think twice before choosing your next password. It might even make you wonder if you should change some of your current ones. Overall, a good read!

The CSS Zen Garden has three new designs: Friendly Beaches, Calm & Smooth, and viridity. Some of the graphics are not the most pleasing, but the designs still implement some great CSS. Friendly Beaches takes the supporting text and creates a one- and two-column layout, which is quite different than what others have done. Calm & Smooth turns each supporting text section into a two-column block of text, making the layout quite interesting!

It’s official: IE5/Mac is dead. Read all about it in Mr. Zeldman’s report.

“The Comic Book” On Hold

A few days ago, while I again could not see my own site and, therefore, could not work on it, I decided to start on a design for the CSS Zen Garden. Ever since I had first seen the site, I knew that I eventually wanted to learn CSS positioning and submit a design, and I finally had some spare time to do so.

I opened up my “Inspiration” folder, where I keep all of my quickly drawn out ideas, and was immediately attracted to some design ideas that I had come up with using a font called BadaBoom. A few hours later, I had the design and stylesheet completed, titled it “The Comic Book,” and submitted it to Dave Shea.

I heard back from him yesterday, and he would like me to add a few things to jazz it up and make it look more like a comic book. I actually wasn’t upset because I rushed the process so much that there are still some aspects of the design that I would like to refine.

That said, be on the lookout over the next couple weeks to see if “The Comic Book” ever reaches the Zen Garden standards! Until then I’ve provided a small preview of it above.

June is Upon Us

The site was down again for me for most of the day, but it just went back up, so I thought I’d jump in before midnight and wish everyone a “Happy June!” And now, a few proverbs about June:

“A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon.”
“A dry May and a leaking June, make the farmer whistle a merry tune.”
“A dripping June keeps all things in tune.”
“A cold and wet June spoils the rest of the year.”
“June damp and warm does the farmer no harm.”

Thank you, FamousQuotes.com.

Long-Awaited Notables

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 28, I got home, fired up my computer, and to my dismay, my site was down. I headed straight for my host’s forums and reported the problem, and they diagnosed it to be a problem with the Reverse DNS Lookup (PTR). Adjustments were made, and I’ve spent that last 66 hours waiting for the changes to propagate.

This waiting period included upwards of 3,000 refreshes, 200 “Delete Cookies” (just to be sure), and a pile of torn out hair, resulting in a tiny bald spot on the back of my head. You have to understand that I would not have been this impatient if I had not just launched a new design and layout, which still needed completion, and a blog, which needed updating.

Anyways, that ordeal is over, and now I leave you with some interesting links and info that I’ve seen or read while awaiting the rebirth of my site.

Stuart Robertson, of DesignMeme, has created a couple new CSS tricks, and both are fantastic. The first, entitled “The Search for the Missing Link“, uses the :hover pseudo-class on a paragraph (cool!), which results in a rollover effect that assists the reader in finding the links within that paragraph. This effect works in Mozilla, Netscape 6+, Opera 7, Safari, and Konqueror.

The second effect he thought up was a pure CSS pulldown menu. It basically uses the :hover pseudo-class on an HTML list, setting the normal list as display:none and the hovered list as visibility:visible, resulting in a pulldown effect. This effect will work in Mozilla, Netscape 6+, Opera 7, Safari, and Camino.

QuickColor, by kohaistyle, is a fun a little color mixer to help you when in need of inspiration. I’ve messed around with it, and most of the schemes are actually quite worthy of being incorporated into a design. Enjoy!

MeBox: The new cardboard storage box. Way too cool.

We’re open, but not for business…

After 24 hours of insanity, I finally got this site up. Yes, I know, it’s still not completely functional or finished, but I’m trying!

It all started Sunday afternoon. (Honestly, only 24 hours!) I knew that I wanted to completely redesign the front- and back-end of AdamPolselli.com, but I didn’t have much knowledge to go on. I feverishly jumped from site to site learning the basics of CSS positioning, and when I thought I had it, opened up Fireworks and created this design.

Next came the coding. I felt like a toddler trying to build a house – I had no idea where to start! So, I headed over to the CSS Zen Garden, opened up Dan Cederholm‘s “A Garden Apart”, and walked through every tag and every style rule until I had figured out how it all worked.

Ten mintues later, I had the basic layout – I never knew it could be so easy! So, I went to bed, woke up, and spent today refining the design and installing Movable Type (oi!) The installation went fairly well, but working with the templates is killing me for some reason. I thought it would be easier.

I have yet to create the rest of the templates (so far I’ve only done index.html), template the entire site with PHP, and move all of the Portfolio, Photography, and Get the Look content to this site. Sounds like fun! (Not!)

So, wish me luck, and check back to see how close (or far) I am from completing the site.