I let this blog fall by the wayside!  I’ve been busy with work but haven’t taken the time to upload my latest projects.

I designed MyToothTrip.com, and I must say the owners were great to work with.  They knew what they wanted, had examples of sites they liked, and even knew the content they intended to use.  It made designing for them a real treat!  Check their site out and tell me what you think.  It was Joomla-based.

My friend Jamie, owner of ThePataCakeBaby.com, is opening a new site, so we’ve been toying around with look/feel ideas.  The store will be Baby Cottage Gifts, so here is a jpeg of a potential header:

Cottage, Trees, Flowers, Grass, and Sky

I’m pretty sure we’ll go a different way, but I wanted to point out that this was all done by hand with vectors.  Jamie asked me, “Where did you get the little graphics?”  Well, I made them!  Ha!  And I did them fairly quickly too.  I’ve been brushing up on my vector skills and I’d say I’m improving.

I have some SEO work to do by Friday, some work for Carrie, and of course the site for Jamie.  And–eventually–I really need to redo my OWN site because I haven’t left enough room for all my portfolio.  I am in a graphic design community on Livejournal and lately there have been a lot of discussions on portfolio display styles.  I want to go back through all the posts and get a clear idea of how I want my portfolio to look, then I’ll redesign my site that way.  For people who are evaluating me as a potential web designer, the portfolio is the most important part.

Also, in my spare moments, I am toying with the idea of designing templates for purchase for Wordpress, Joomla, and more.  I’ve become pretty proficient at these.  I need to look into how to go about integrating a shopping cart with my site, or setting up a second site with a shopping cart for immediate graphic and template purchase.  Perhaps this is down the line!  But it’s something on my mind.

I had a lot of fun creating this:

Whew!  Just got done with a round of changes, both graphic and code, to a website.  It’s fun to see how well I can do, jumping into someone else’s template!  I liked it.  Here’s what I did:

Navigation

• Left-aligned the text in the left-hand column
• Decreased the width of the left-hand column
• Increased the line height of the text in the left-hand column
• Added a hover-over color to the text of the left-hand column
• Added the “Information” menu as a horizontal menu in the footer
• Added key menu items across the top in the turquoise bar, under the banner
• Changed header image to return user to homepage

Look/feel

• Added Posh Mom sticker and Paypal button to banner image
• Made the banner about 20px shorter
• Made a “favicon” and uploaded it to the server

I’ve also just finished up a round of graphics that will go into a flash inset in the same site.  They aren’t ready yet, however, because we need to firm up what offers will go in the bubbles.  When I have it finished, I’ll post it!  (This is really fun stuff for me…how many other mothers get to fiddle with code and graphics while their babies nap?  I’m so lucky!)

Just felt like fiddling around a little with drawing water bubbles from scratch (see above for my results).  Lately I’ve been challenging myself to draw all my own vectors…it’s fun!  And I can change sizes of objects without pixelation.  My husband has an extra wide-screen monitor, and any day now we are going to get another video card for my desktop so that I can have not one, but TWO wide-screen monitors.  Any day now.  Annny day.  (tick tock!)  Can you tell I’m anxious?

In the meantime, I’ll have to get by with one.  Next I’m working on converting photos to vectored 3-D graphics.  Gosh, that sounds like it has some depth to it.  Perhaps I should grab a cup of espresso?  YES.