Design

Even recent readers will likely remember the Flore hat that I made in December of last year. As luck would have it, there was enough leftover yarn from making that one to… make another one! This way, the original recipient can be utterly mortified at her mother wearing a matching flower petal hat. Sounds fair, no? (more…)

Really, really long-time readers of this site may recall its first incarnation. It was very geeky, with a *NIX motif running through it. (You can view an Internet Wayback Machine snapshot of it here.) I am attempting to recreate this feel with the newly-returned covert-ops.org site, and I need your help.

Clearly, some of the headings that I had before simply won’t work these days. I mean, who has a QuickCam any more? But, there are other sections I would like to add, and sometimes, the appropriate geeky header doesn’t immediately jump to mind, or I have too many ideas that seem equally valid. This is where you come in. (more…)

It was brought to my attention that I haven’t made my annual announcement that I have been designing custom planners (think DayRunner™ or DayTimer™ or Franklin Covey™, but based upon your designs) for more than 20 years. (That’s right. Since high school.) If you’ve been fighting to work within a system, instead of working a system, I might be able to help. Drop me a line, and I’ll work with you to design the planner of your dreams. (Or at least one that isn’t based in nightmares.)

If you’ve paid attention at all over the last n years, you know that one of the things I do is design custom planners. So, I spend a lot of time creating calendars of various sorts. I was working on one today, and I stumbled upon something:

If you’re one of the people whose calendar weeks run Sunday – Saturday, then February 2015 fits exactly into a 4-week spread. I don’t think I’ve encountered that before, or at least, it never stuck out enough to be noticed before.

That’s all. Nothing overly interesting. I said it was a dorky realization, didn’t I? And yet you read on. You have nobody to blame but yourself.

Greetings, all!

I know that there might be one or two other InDesign experts out there reading this, and I figured that, instead of polling individually and perhaps missing other closet experts, I’d post here.

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As the end of the year comes rushing at us, if any of you are looking for a new DayRunner / DayTimer / Franklin Covey style planner, but none of the one out there really match the way you work, drop me a note. I can probably work with you to design a planner that fits your usage patterns better than something off the shelf. (Really. I do this. 🙂 )

If anyone out there does layout and design and needs some pretty decent iconic imagery to use, I’m passing on an icon I recently found: FontAwesome. It includes 220 icons and vectors. It even has IE7 support. (And, from the developer’s page: If you need it, you have my condolences.)

I thought some of you might find it worth checking out.

I’ve spent some time over the last couple of days wrangling with Dreamweaver. I started to write up what Dreamweaver is, and what its alternatives are, and why those pieces of information are pertinent to the story. But then I realized that, if I have to explain these things, you’re not really going to get the story, which is ok. Not everybody has to get every story. Instead, the story shall stand on its own.

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However, this plan requires that I have a design epiphany for a project I’m working sometime in the next couple of days. If anyone has a mojo in that area, please tell the Muses to drop me a visit, k?

Thanks!

I have spent the bulk of today working on a layout project, where I’m fiddling with making things line up to the thousandth (yes, thousandth) of an inch, and going cross-eyed, and deciding if a leading of 28.2 or 28.3 works better in this situation, and exporting to PDF to make sure that things look the way I think things look, and generally not coming up for air for several hours.

And I’ve been loving every minute of it.