Busyness: bunny blankie redux

Because I had an excess of yarn leftover from the first bunny blankie, and another baby-on-the-way announcement ringing in my ears, I decided to make another. But this time I would reverse the colours, just to be different!

…and this is where you need to trust the designer sometimes. Designer knows best. Designer has gone through all the different possibilities of colours and numbers of bunnies and styles, and published the one that works.

For some reason, dark brown bunnies on a tan background really drew attention to the fact that brown is…well…the colour of poo. Or as the Captain pointed out, as though the bunnies were turds on a blanket. Which, given that it’s for a baby, is maybe not the worst thing since babies are turd factories, but still, the blanket at this point is mostly for the parents and the last thing they want is to be presented with something so nasty lookin’.

Needless to say I ripped that sucker back and started over, with the colours specified in the pattern.

Busyness: blankie for Baby Bear

As hoped, the corner-to-corner blankie for Baby Bear knitted up just as quick and sweet as I could possibly hope for.

all done!

It needs some pretty major blocking but I might just leave it in a diamond because, you know, laziness.

One minor piss-off is that colour change in the top right hand corner. I am pretty diligent about getting the same dye-lot and apparently for this brand, it’s optional for the same dye-lot numbers to have the same dye-lot colours. Which is irritating. I rely on the companies to be consistent with the dye-lots. That’s the entire freaking point of putting a dye-lot number on the label. If I didn’t care about the colours matching, I’d buy the “no dye lot” 5 pound bag of yarn ends for $10 or whatever it is.

Ahem. Maybe it was more than a minor piss-off…

Ah well. It is soft and cuddly and Baby Bear rolled around on it and I wrapped her up like a happy little burrito in it, so I’d say that works.

Week six: wireframes ummm what?

I don’t even want to get into how long it took me to realize what a wireframe was. Suffice to say that I did indeed figure it out in time to do the assignment, which was find examples of three different types of navigational layouts and then create a wireframe of one of them.

For anyone who is ignorant like me, a wireframe is a sketch of a website’s layout. Wireframe is a specialized technical word for web design, which sends me down another trip down memory lane back to undergrad linguistics. Specialized technical language helps create communities of expertise and helps people in the same field identify one another and keep non-experts at arms’ length.*

At any rate, I chose a couple of faves: Smitten Kitchen for vertical and Knitty for horizontal. What really struck me was that many websites now have multiple ways of navigation. Which can be useful as it offers the user multiple ways of exploring the site; however, having too many choices can be confusing and ultimately as frustrating as having too few. One more for keep it simple.

In terms of finding an experimental navigational website, I had to turn to my old friend Google because all of my favourite websites are pretty standard navigation.

I then used Gliffy to create a very, very basic wireframe of Smitten Kitchen that I will not add here; suffice to say that I would much rather have the logo guru’s little Moleskin journal to sketch in. And also it’s kind of interesting that you always have to start from a sketch. No one can just produce something fully formed without a rough draft (bar Zeus/Athena). No matter how well-developed it may be in the mind’s eye, there are always multiple attempts and do-overs before it’s just right.

*My definition may be somewhat coloured by my experience of the sociolinguistics class, which may or may not have involved dozing off in the back row/gossiping with a friend.

Busyness: Knitting

I am working on a baby blanket for a friend. It is revoltingly cute, with bunnies that have fluffy tails and everything. It will look like this when it is done:

redonkulously cute

It is from Stitch N Bitch: Superstar Knitting, and on the surface, it is a very simple pattern. It is just counting.

I am enraged with the design.

The pattern chart is in a graph, with the little boxes in different colours to make up the bunnies. You count the little boxes to make sure you get the right amount of stitches in each colour and voila! Bunny.

Except when the graph is TINY and my fat fingers cover the little boxes when I’m trying to count them and the rows are too close together to have the numbers on the same side. My bunnies did not look like the ones in the picture. They were misbegotten mutant bunnies. I thought at first that I could power through and it would fix itself, and it became glaringly obvious that they were only getting worse, and it would be shameful to give to someone as a present. A few mistakes you can pass off as wabi-sabi; these bunnies meant that I can’t count.

And so I heaved a great sigh and began ripping back what I had knitted and started from scratch, this time counting everything twice. Hopefully it will be done in time for the baby’s arrival.

Busyness: Cookery

On that terrible rainy weekend at the end of June, it was so cool out I decided to make strawberry jam.

I have fond memories of making jam with my mom and my grandmothers, though somehow my memory tends to omit the sheer godawful amount of time it takes to make old-fashioned jam (that is to say, no pectin). Because to get strawberries, sugar, and a splash of lemon juice to stop being chunky syrup and start being lovely spreadable jam involves a long time of slow boiling. And oh the steam from the boiling water to sterilize the jars! Good thing it was cool out.

While I was waiting for the jam to get to that magical point of doneness, I thought about the concept of done. When I first started cooking in earnest after heading off to university, I begged some favourite recipes from my grandmother – handwritten, and often with cryptic instructions like “boil until it looks right” or “bake until done.” And this drove me nuts. I had no idea what that meant. Ditto bread recipes, with their “knead till stretchy,” and of course jam recipes, with “slow boil” and “gelled” or “set.”

Of course it turns out that all of these instructions make perfect sense – with experience. After making bread a handful of times, suddenly I did know the point when the dough had been worked enough. You can feel it in your hands that it’s stretchy and springy and ready to rise. Same thing with the jam. After a couple of slogs, I could see that it was getting thicker and was gelling on the back of the spoon as I stirred.

And it occurred to me that it’s like anything as you gain expertise, that you get to the point of experience and you just know. So good logo designers know when they’ve got it right and can stop fiddling, and good website designers know when they’ve reached the best user experience.

Me? I doubt that I’ll get there – I’ll stick with jam instead.

“Strawberry Jam” by Michelle Shocked

Old fashioned strawberry jam

What’s in a logo?

One of the assignments for class was to dissect a logo using the various principles of design as laid out in the text. The logo that I used, Weleda, gave me plenty to work with, with contour bias, anthropomorphic form, biophilia effect, and proportional density.

For contour bias, the lines used in the logo are gently curved, and thus more attractive and appealing than if they were sharp.

Anthropomorphic form: the outside lines suggest two people bending towards one another; at the top, one can either imagine hands holding or foreheads leaning towards one another.

Biophilia effect: this is less the logo and more on the packaging, which emphasizes the natural ingredients of the products, using pictures of the herbs and flowers that are used.

Proportional density: There are, to me, definitely enough propositions to be interesting. In the shape of the outside lines we have people, and, taken together, an oval or egg, a very natural and attractive form. The suggestion of hand holding/heads bending together evokes togetherness and trust. Inside the oval there is a design that evokes the rod of Asclepius, which in turn generates a sense of trust for the quality and benefits of the product, leaning as it does on centuries of medicine and knowledge.

I found it fascinating to really break down a little design that I see every day and don’t generally pay any attention to, and consider how much work went into creating it. I’ve resolved to be a little more mindful and take time to notice things like this to appreciate the time and effort that someone, somewhere put in.

Busyness: prank crafts

I am a firm believer that gag gifts show love. The more elaborate the gag, the more time (and love) is invested in it. To whit: a friend of mine recently learned how to cross-stitch. She has an extremely photogenic cat. These two things seem unrelated until: Stitch a Photo. And then this glorious birthday present was born:

I never knew there were so many shades of ecru.

It kind of blows my mind that you can take a picture and have someone convert it into a cross-stitch graph, including the right colours of embroidery floss. Well. Convert using a fancy-pants software designer. A very far cry from olden times when it was more or less freestyling – which also blows my mind. Seriously, sitting down to create this:

so many hours of work in such poor light

Hardcore!

Week four: To be content with content

Now that the course has forced my hand and I am blogging, I also need to have content for said blog. Tempting as it may be to stuff it full of links to other people’s content, that’s not really going to get me that far.

The creative brief exercise was surprisingly effortful. The clever thing to do would have been to create a blog that I could use professionally, adding it to my LinkedIn profile (rarely used) and my resume (ditto). But what on earth do I have to talk about?

I’ve seen library blogs and non-profit snarks, and they’re great, but I don’t think it’s in me to do one.

I don’t feel authoritative enough to have a tips and tricks site on, well, anything.

I don’t have some grand journey that needs to be shared.

Everything that I do is fairly small-scale. My hobbies are modest. I never get into anything enough to get all the gear. I’m a dabbler. And so there will be my blog: my dabbles, my fun, by me for me (and perhaps a select few family and friends to whom I will confess the existence of this blog).

And now for the links to websites that have content I love:

http://the-toast.net/

http://thehairpin.com/

http://geekologie.com/

http://torontoist.com/

Busyness: Gardening

So we recently moved to a place that features outdoor space, and I decided to try my hand at gardening. When I was a child, it was an assigned chore, and I hated it like fire; now that I am adult, for some reason pulling weeds is an appealing way of spending my time. Child-me is totally disappointed with adult-me.

Our front lawn was dug up in the fall so that our water pipes could be replaced (yay, no more lead!) and it left the lawn looking…a little sad. So step one was a retaining wall:

all in a day’s work for Team Awesome

Which, as one might imagine, took a fair amount of planning, researching, DESIGNING, and then redoing and redoing and redoing, as we kept trying to get it juuuuuuusst right.

Step two was plants. I had to restrain myself quite hard on this one. I wanted to get all the plants. I wanted it to look like this:

Just like this, RIGHT NOW

But I have accepted that 1) I have to work with partial shade and 2) gardening takes time.

So I have ended up with this:

Not quite the garden of my imaginings.

There are still a few more plants that I’d like to add in, and the real test will be next spring to see if all of these come back. And then…then, we’ll see.

Week three: Girls just wanna have fun

Have fun designing, that is. Design is supposed to be fun – it is a creative endeavour that allows you to really push your boundaries and be playful. Like the design guru in the video that Amos shared – Aaron Draplin is clearly doing what he loves. He is having fun and doing work at the same time.

I am not good at letting go and having fun when it comes to work. I want things to be right. I am not sure when fun drained away and being “correct” became all-powerful, but here we are and here I am in a course where messing around and trying different styles/colours/fonts/whatever is encouraged.

On one hand this is exciting – no wrong answers! This is a work in progress! I can foozle around until it feels right!

And on the other hand it is terrifying – of course there are wrong answers! Think of the user experience, dummy! Good design means you get it right and have a consistent product that people can recognize and appreciate!

At any rate, so far with this website I have changed the layout three times and edited all my posts on average of twice. So it’s a good thing that at this point it’s just for me.