Habitual

I had a great idea to develop a simple website that lets you see a sample paragraph with a headline and adjust the various points of typography. I looked around on the internet and didn't see anything so I'll put something together eventually and host it at github pages or the home page.

I think my design aesthetic is improving. It's becoming more apparent what I like and don't like, which is certainly a change from "What is this I don't even--"

Also can't seem to shut off work brain.

Back to "school"

I signed up for the three classes being offered for free by Stanford: Machine Learning, Intro to Artificial Intelligence, and Intro to databases. I started watching the lectures today, even though class doesn't "start" until October 10th.

In other news, my order of Hardboiled Design came in, so I've been digging through that as well as the last two books I am reading on design.

JavaScript learning is slow-moving, but moving, none-the-less. Mostly getting excited about my new job that I start next Monday!

Would love to know if any fellow readers are also taking the online courses that have been publicized on Reddit and Hacker News. I'm pumped for these classes and I hope I can directly apply some of this to my job.

CSS and SVG

While I'm trucking along on the HTML/CSS process (making mockups all day in illustrator, what what!), this link popped up in my twitter feed from Hacker News.

A Farewell to CSS3 Gradients covers the hate in working with gradients, the messy evolution of CSS, and a quick and dirty introduction to SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics. I don't think it's end all solution (with the speed of the internet these days, we might as well just save gradients as pngs), but certainly a suggestible alternative.

Little more work to do tonight, maybe some JavaScript fun if I can get around to it. I promised myself I'd fix a JQuery bug by tonight or tomorrow morning.

Web Designer Wall

I'm a big fan of this website.

While the work week ramps up, this page has been really effective in helping me figure out the more advanced things in css, and in turn, creating some really cool experiences (well, I think they're cool) on the web.

Web Designer Wall

Short Term Goals

Productive day today. Finally decided to play around with the CSS on the blog. It's not quite the way I want it yet, but it's new and much better than what was there originally.

Few more opportunities arose.

Working with my younger brother to fix up the Citations drum and bugle corps website (aka, teaching him what I know so he can ditch Dreamweaver, and prettying up his designs). It's cool so far. I have much less say in the design, but he's appreciating what I've done so far, like balance out the site to a better grid, clean up the CSS and HTML so it's readable, etc, and I've liked what he's put together too.

Completely redesigned on paper CTDJ. I wasn't happy with the final product that I released to them a few weeks ago, so I went back to the notebook. I think this next design will be much more ideal and a lot more modern.

Finally, working on a structural engineering website for a small firm. I'm really excited for this one because the communication has been solid so far. Also have some really nifty ideas--hoping to maintain and preserve the original website while making it look very portfolio-ish.

JavaScript: Finishing chapter 4 of Eloquent. Realized why I had such a hard time to get through it last time--the examples are nice, but so far it's not very applicable to web design, and I don't think the problems are very clear about where the data comes from, especially since some of it is stored on the webpage without you know what it looks like. Ah well, I'll keep moving forward. It's been easier editing and fixing bugs in javascript already written since it's somewhat easy to follow when formatted okay.

Otherwise, counting eggs sounds good right now.

Night.

Fork Me on Github

Something about this banner always bugs me.

I want to fix it.

Back to JavaScript

I'm getting much more comfortable working around html5 and css3 (I know, behind the times, right?), so I thought I'd spend this week working through Eloquent Javascript. I started it a bit ago, but when the job hunt became much more intrusive to time (as in, frequent interviews and the like), the exercises were put off to the side. Since I'll be working as an intern doing front end development until the end of the year, it makes sense to make JavaScript the language I learn.

Eloquent JavaScript is 14 chapters long, with 2 appendices after. This learning gameplan will be two chapters daily until it's done, then go back and read through the Web Standards curriculum over at Opera for JavaScript, improving my usage with websites.

Next in the book list is Responsive Web Design. I'd like to get to Hardboiled CSS first, but I'm waiting for my hardcopy to come in the mail.

Will try to keep up with the learning part of the blog as I get through the chapters this week. Till then!