The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Science & Nature => Topic started by: Choop on June 13, 2004, 07:42:01 pm
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I've got a new page design (http://www.10mar2001.com/temp/wonderland.html) for a business the missus and I are starting (more on that at a later date).
Would y'all mind taking a look & commenting?
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I am far from expert in this sort of thing, so all I can offer is my layman's opinion.
I liked the general layout and the banner.
I did not like the background. Too busy -- distracted me from the text.
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I dig it (again with the caveat that I'm a layman). Is the background from squidfingers (http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/)? I really like their aesthetic.
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I liked the background and I like it even better if it is from a place called Squidfingers.
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I like the taters. I call my sweetie my little red potato. I don't mind the background, and I especially like the non-symetricallity.
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Actually, I drew the background based on that found on cameronmoll.com (http://www.cameronmoll.com/) (found via Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/)). Flip the scalloping, switch the shadows, adjust the colors, and create a new pattern inside the scallop, and voila. I might try it a bit more washed-out, though. However - his is a 1600px-wide background which includes the shadow to the text; mine is a small pattern, with different techniques on the shadow.
Now, I'm the furthest thing from a designer. I steal bits and pieces, and have tiny little ideas, but pushing pixels is one of the most difficult technical tasks in which I endeavor. Coding is my game, and I'm trying to keep the pixel-pushing to a minimum. Most of that layout is CSS.
...er, </geek>
UPDATE: I scrolled through squidfingers, and found something interesting (http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/?type=patterns&id=8). It would seem my scalloping background comes indirectly from squidfingers.
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I don't understand you when you talk like that, and quite frankly, it frightens me.
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UPDATE: I scrolled through squidfingers, and found something interesting (http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/?type=patterns&id=8). It would seem my scalloping background comes indirectly from squidfingers.
Good good... this way I get to be right-ish AND you can keep your web-designey cred.
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AH- but I'm making my own from scratch right now, a little more food-related. I'll show you when it's done.
UPDATE: Yeah, it's done. (http://www.10mar2001.com/temp/wonderland.html)
The bee's cheesy, I know, but this is still a prototype.
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Wow. Yellow.
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I liked the red one better.
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Would y'all mind taking a look & commenting?
i feel mid-sized garden.
i feel brightness and happiness.
i feel i must tell you that i really don't like yellow, but that the yellowness you are enslaving doesn't make me want to immediately close my browser. the bee may be "cheesy" but he appears to be happy.
i like the banner.
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I think I liked the other one better, but this one is pretty cool. I liked the old background shape better. The bee looks jaggedy to me which jars with the taters. I like taters.
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I like it quite a bit - if the context of the site is to be wholesome-natural, you've got it. I'd like to see a more realistic bee, as the food stuffs are all real photos and the cartoon-y bee doesn't quite jive for me.
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pushing pixels is one of the most difficult technical tasks in which I endeavor
The bee's cheesy, I know, but this is still a prototype.
The bee will be replaced. If I keep the honeycomb, which I probably will. The bee will also fly in and alight at a random spot on the honeycomb, but only on the first visit of the session. That's no problem. Making a realistic-looking bee with a transparent background (.gif format, I have to support IE too) is a problem. Any volunteers?
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I think you need to dial-down the saturation on that background a bit - it's very... yellow. And distracting.
I don't know, I'd try upping the lightness and downing the saturation. I assume you have Photoshop.
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I thought about that too, but I want the honeycomb (if I keep it) to be a little more realistic than abstract, and I want the bee to appear at the same intensity. If you see a washed-out bee flying around a washed-out honeycomb, belief will be more difficult to suspend than a normal-looking bee and a normal-looking honeycomb, yes? A washed-out honeycomb with a normal-looking bee just plain won't work.
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Yeah, okay, but the bee is five times too big to fit into those honeycombs.
And the honeycombs themselves are too even and yellow to look realistic (they should be a little orangier).
So a tiny 10px bee flying into perfectly repeating honeycombs... you see what I mean?
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Yeah, okay, but the bee is five times too big to fit into those honeycombs.
I do kinda like the idea of a gigantic bee permanently exiled from his geometric home and community, but perhaps this was not the desired effect of your web-site.
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The little research I did (http://images.google.com/images?q=honeycomb) on bee-size to honeycomb-size showed some proportion actually fairly similar to what's there.
Again: I'm not a graphic designer.
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perfectly repeating honeycombs... you see what I mean?
And therein lies the rub: I can't responsibly make a natural-looking honeycomb, because it'll always be perfectly repeating. I'm working up a new version, and I've also made a washed-out version of the pink, but I think the missus is hooked on the honeycomb already.
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Is this new site to be for Mrs. Choop's new blog?
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No, this new site is to be for the Choops' (yes, plural possessive) new company: a Personal Chef service for the Atlanta Metro area. We're
six and tarred sick and tired of working for other people, and there is plenty of money in that market. Plus, we're damned good cooks, and love each other enough for work not to get in the way. So that helps.
Now it's up to successful marketing and management-of-the-company, and we should be set for years based on a successful venture such as this. In a few years, we'll franchise to a caterer who happens to be interested in the brand, but until then we'll happily drive around town cooking in various and sundry peoples' homes for ca$h mon€y.
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Awesome. So have you thrown all good sense to the wind and quit your well-paying jobs yet?
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Not just yet. We're stockpiling savings, and making sure our infrastructure is sound before we take that path. Plus we're going to have to go from like 2 clients/week to like 10 in just a couple weeks, so that's going to be tough.
BUT: we'll be free from the bonds that hold us prisoners to the MAN today. Something to look forward to.
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BUT: we'll be free from the bonds that hold us prisoners to the MAN today. Something to look forward to.
Nah, you're just trading them for a different (perhaps more comfortable) set of bonds.
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The point is we'll hold our own bonds. We shan't be prisoners to THE MAN any further, we'll be held only to our own obligations. That's the goal.
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Well that's where I'm at right now Choop. It's a weird naked feeling to have no "boss." This is the first time since my first job at the ripe old age of 15 1/2 that I haven't had someone telling me what to do. Every so often I feel breifly paniced because the synapses haven't yet accepted that I'm getting paid to do what I want, how I want. I have a moment of thinking "oh my god, I have to find a job!"-type panic, like I used to during breif periods of unemployment that I've had in the past. 10 years of being someone else's employee is very hard to break!
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Choop, this is one of those important turning point moments in your life and I'm happy for you - not having to work hard to make someone else rich is a step in the right direction.
The advice that people gave me when I went into business for myself (and believe me, they gave advice whether I asked for it or not) was to save my salary for three full months when I decided to quit - so that I'd see what it was like to live off of my business income and then have three full months of backup should something go wrong.
Actually, they said "six months" as looking for work can take longer than three these days. But still, things will probably be tight for the first year (even if you're successful, because you'll be re-investing money into your business to grow it) and you'll be doing the job that five people in your previous line of work used to do.
But if you hate sleeping and don't mind being poor for awhile now to enjoy the fruits later (that delayed gratification thing was something that I could never quite grasp, myself) then you're on your way to living...
THE AMERICAN DREAM[/color]
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This is not the first self-employment venture in our small family. When we lived in Tampa -shudder- we had a catering company, which happened to use the same name as this one will. The missus catered her head off for a year, but the money wasn't coming in like we'd hoped (so that I could join her in the company), and then vengeful parents at the school where she did lunches and cooked all the rest of the food too gave her the boot: the fourth caterer they'd fired in as many years. So we hung it up and came back to Atlanta shortly after that.
The kicker was that we were in the black the whole time we had that company. We can do this, man, we can do this.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. That means a lot.