Square Leaf Designs: web and print design

Growing Pains

squareleaf — Thu, 03 May 2012 02:26:04 +0000

Forgive me that this site is currently rather disheveled looking. I’m flipping to a new theme based on a grid system, and I’m still working out how this will display. Due to time constraints, I have to work on it in small chunks. Stay tuned…

Responsive Web Design

squareleaf — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:15:30 +0000

It’s amazing how much house-hunting can consume every moment of your spare time. But, now that it’s over, I can get back to adding to my to-do list and cranking through some awesome projects.

Related to awesome projects, I attended a really great presentation a couple evenings ago on Responsive Web Design. Led by two of the staff members from University Communications at UW-Madison, it balanced discussion of theory with practical code examples. I have a redesign of an old website coming up for a playwright client. I’m considering designing it as responsive website, but I’m wondering if it’s necessary for the audience of a playwright’s site. What do you think? Would you look at the website for a playwright while in intermission at one of his plays?

Simple, Clean Design

squareleaf — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:40:34 +0000

I just came across a good article from sixrevisions.com on doing simple, clean web designs, via a Tweet from webdesignshock.com. Unlike many other articles on clean design, excellent as those articles may be, this goes beyond just showing examples of good designs and talks about how to achieve them.

I’ve been thinking that, even though I never got this portfolio site completely finished to the level I had envisioned in my mind, I’m thinking of dumping it all and coming at my original idea from a different direction, using the 960 grid. I wanted to do a cleaner, spare design, but wasn’t sure how to start. This article talks about achieving simplicity by doing a design that is as complex as you want, and then removing elements until you find the elements that have to stay to hold the design together. This makes more sense to me than trying to start simple and ruining it by adding more and more. In short, if you’ve been struggling with creating a simple, clean website, the sixrevisions article is a great place to start.

Saving Energy

squareleaf — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 02:58:57 +0000

I’m a big fan of saving energy, living simply and living below my means as a way to increased happiness. With that in mind, I’m always interested in simple ways to incorporate energy savings into everyday life without making into an inconvenient slog. Apartment Therapy’s blog has an article on easy ways to save energy (and money) around the house, each easy to implement when replacing an appliance or looking to spend some money upgrading your house. Many of these wouldn’t be useful for renters, but the biggest energy savings (50% more energy saved than your old TV!) is in transitioning to an LED-backlit LCD television, which does move from apartment to apartment.

Some SSL magic

squareleaf — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:18:49 +0000

My field is primarily web design and development, but my main employment also includes some end user support duties. Aside from day-to-day tasks like adding users or restoring files from backup, I primarily have left the administration of the server to a network consulting agency. We recently purchased a new server and began migrating from our old server, which was a task I left largely to the agency. I wanted someone with more experience to handle it, since downtime while I muddled through a task I’d never tried would squash my co-workers’ ability to do their jobs, and I didn’t have the resources to do practice runs. But, after some hiccups with the consulting agency, I found myself needing to move our SSL certificate from the new server back to the old server so that Outlook Web Access could continue to run on the old server while some delays with the new server deployment were worked out. I’m pleased to say that after some careful research and some really great phone support from GoDaddy, I managed to move our certificate back to the old server, and got our OWA working again for our remote staff. While I’m not going to try tackling the migration of the Exchange mailboxes, I have decided that my success with this experience was good enough that I’m now going to try installing our anti-virus remote server and our printers onto the new server. My strengths are definitely in web design and programming, but I think that having some level of confidence in networking matters (and knowing when I’m out of my depth) bring a richness to my understanding of the issues involved in keeping a web server running. While I’m not going to pursue networking as a passion as a result of this experience, I do think it will make me a better developer, since I’ll understand issues on the networking side of the fence.

Learning from mistakes

squareleaf — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:52:35 +0000

I just read a really good essay on Lifehacker about identifying and learning from mistakes. Honestly, I’m blogging about it so that I can find the link later, but I thought others might benefit from it as well. So often, when navigating our career and life paths, we can abandon a particular path because of a mistake, rather than using that mistake to improve how we walk on that particular road. The key is striking the delicate balance between learning from mistakes and punishing yourself for them. In both programming and design, mistakes are inevitable and learning won’t happen without them.

PHP book review

squareleaf — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:35:40 +0000

I recently completed a PHP refresher course titled PHP Essentials. The instructor, editor of php|architect, was looking for someone to run through the course to work out any kinks, and I was looking for a PHP refresher. While taking the class via Skype over the course of several months (it is hard to align the schedules of two busy women!), I decided that having a book to work through at the same time would complement the course and provide another way of looking at the same material. The first book available through interlibrary loan was PHP 5 / MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner, so I checked that out. I worked through the first few chapters, but I ended up returning it unfinished. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the title. It presented the information in a way that didn’t seem to build logically. For instance, it presented the $_POST concept before discussing arrays. It also advised the use of the print function instead of echo or print_r. I seldom run into the use of print in PHP projects, so I found it odd that echo and print_r were not even mentioned. It’s back to the library and the next book in the queue for me.

New site launched for APA Editor

squareleaf — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:36:23 +0000

I recently completed a new site, built in WordPress. The site is for APA Editor, Ardell Broadbent. She previously had a site built in GoDaddy’s Website Tonight product that was no longer serving her needs. Despite the fact that Website Tonight does not have an easy export function, I saved all the content for the site, converted and updated it, and optimizing it by stripping out extraneous html and spacing along the way. We redid the color scheme to match some color research she had done and added some downloads. The client was very happy with the site, and we will soon be working on another site for her vacation rental property.

End of Stagnancy

squareleaf — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 02:46:47 +0000

A couple of months ago, I noticed a dramatic and pronounced upswing in my interests and motivation. For various reasons I won’t go into here, the previous 18 months or so had been a rather stagnant stretch in my life. I don’t think that stagnant periods are necessarily periods of inactivity. After a series of changes or a flood of growth, it is sometimes necessary for a system to move into a period of seeming stillness while the lessons and changes of the period of growth have time to sink in and percolate through the system. Once that process completes, a new period of growth, learning and expansion can begin. Now that a new period of growth has begun, I find that my desire to learn as fast and as thoroughly as possible is really invigorating and refreshing. As far as technology goes, this has manifested in an interest in brushing up on skills, and on teaching myself new skills, specifically mobile app development. Stay tuned!

Always learning

squareleaf — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:30:27 +0000

I’ve been taking a PHP refresher class through a friend who edits a PHP magazine, trying to keep my skills current in an often-changing field. I found a couple other good online, “casual” courses that I’d recommend as well. Codecademy does a brief intro course in JavaScript that could be a good refresher or introduction. And Method of Action is putting together a series of courses for teaching programmers how to design. I took their kerning quiz and got 85 out of 100. What can I say – I’m a sucker for quizzes! Both of these online courses are free, as far as I can tell, and they’re actually kind of fun. They’re certainly not going to make you into an expert, but they’re a good way to brush up or delve into something you don’t know.