My Life on the Net

So, we’ve got a lot to talk about.

1. NaBloPoMo is finished.
2. New theme!
3. The shaving of heads.
4. What September holds.

NaBloPoMo is finished!

In a way I’m going to miss it, but in a way I’m relieved I can make posts that are a lot more content rich for you all to enjoy.  By the end of this month I was finding it hard to have a single idea.  So, shall I be doing it again?

Definitely, but not for a couple of months.

I’ve met a lot a bloggers, expanded my horizons and while I’ve been blogging for over a year I’ve learnt a lot over the past month.

New theme!

So, you may have noticed the green is gone and that it’s been replaced by a rich brown (to correspond with the start of autumn).  This is something I’ve been working on and off for the past month.  The last theme, although I liked it, did get a little hard to manage thanks to the fact it was all made on a single day.  The new one has been made to LAST – but I may play around with a few elements once in a while.

Don’t worry if you subscribe via RSS as you won’t notice any difference in your feeds, but if you don’t you’ll be able to get this blog sent to you each time by email. Links in the sidebar!

The Shaving of Heads

I hope you haven’t forgotten that today is the day, and there’s a few reasons I’m definitely going to do it.  Most of the reason for change is symbolic, because I NEED change.  I’ll be streaming it live from 11pm tonight (click here to see the local times around the world – but for sensibility it’s 6pm eastern) and remember that it’s all up to you as to how short I cut it off when you visit the chat room.

And so I don’t forget – it’ll all be on http://www.blogtv.com/People/fusedreality.

Update - just to tell those who might be feeling that this is controversial, i’m not going to be completely shaved off, I’ve decided that much.  That would just look weird.  It’ll be more of a buzz cut like the one below… (thanks to Brad Dielman for the image)

What September Holds

I’m going to be basically on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday routine from now on, with a meme post on Sundays.  This may be hindered for a few days after the 14th since I’ll be moving from my hometown of Edinburgh and back up to Dundee to my new student flat.  Can’t wait – but my internet social activities will be hindered while I meet new friends and meet up with new ones.  Oh, and probably get drunk a few times.

Today is the third annual CSS Naked Day which is used to promote web standards. It’s as simple as that.  This is your chance to show how your website is still accessible and usable with it’s clothes off.

There were just over 1,500 people who were stripping everything off today, so why don’t you join them?

I’ve been dreaming again… I often think of the way I’d love things, but it’s always a little difficult to imagine it. The past month I’ve been OBSESSED with trying to figure out what my dream home would look like. I’ve been thinking in circles, in octagons and every shape imaginable.

I figured it out. Now, I’m not exactly an architect. Sure, I’ve passed Advanced Higher Art - but that doesn’t make me an artist. I’m a designer. My father is though, but I’ve never really learned anything about architecture from him. Well.. he did tell me to do one thing… “Don’t get into architecture.”

Last night I just doodled for a while, and I started to figure it out. It was amazing. I thought I’d share what I came up with. It’s not exactly finished, but it’s getting there.

The front of the house hasn’t been given much consideration. It’s just a bog-standard flat face.

It looks a little nicer from the side. I might add some windows, but I was kind of thinking this may go in between houses in the city (So close up that stuff such as windows don’t make sense).

You might also notice the fact that the left hand side of the roof is slightly slanted, just enough to drip the rain off yet look good.

Also, for the end of the roof which covers the balcony - I was thinking it may be pretty cool if it retracted into the roof when not needed to let more light in.

Ignore the lines, that’s just Sketchup being an ass. The bottom will have a lot more windows - right now the living room has none! The middle windows at the bottom and top take you to the corridors of both the top and bottom floors. The windows on the right take you to the kitchen/dining room area.

The balcony has a thick glass to stop people from falling off - but even if little children are walking around the top their view won’t be spoiled.

The stairs don’t need to be there - but I know a little from my dad regarding new buildings, and I know I’d need a fire escape for the top floor.

The kitchen is in the bottom floor, and incorporates the dining room too. Pretty basic, and includes a breakfast bar and built in accessories. Tasty.

Here’s the bottom guest room. There’s also a small kids bedroom (same size) and a bathroom and restroom (but I forgot about them in the design and closed them off from the rest of the house - oops!) including a living room on the bottom floor.

The top floor is a lot more interesting - let’s just call it my ‘personal space’.

The ofice is pretty simple. It’s just a small workstation but enough to make sure I could get my work come without interruptions.

Yes, a home cinema. With about 17 seats. I had to. It’s been a dream of mine for ages!

There’s also another bathroom, restroom, spare room (don’t know what to do with it), darkroom (just because), utilities store and the master bedroom - but I didn’t want to make this post too big.

So far, I’m pretty chuffed.

I looked all weekend for a basic screen printing kit. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and not just pay cafepress a fee to print my ideas onto a t-shirt. I want to MAKE it. I’m sure most people will understand that.

No art store seemed to have the photo-sensitive paint I was looking for - unless it was in a kit that was too expensive for me to afford. I didn’t want to spend £30 just on a small bottle of paint and a whole load of useless tools.

It’s a surprise what you can do with the stuff you have around you. All I had was some cotton mesh, some glue, fabric paint, drawing pins and an old picture frame. All that I needed.

The Tools of the Trade (and my feet)

It’s a surprisingly basic technique:

• Stretch and pin the cotton mesh onto the back of the picture frame.
• Draw the design.
• Brush on the glue into the negative parts of the design (e.g. the bits you don’t want to get paint going through).
• Wait to dry.
• Place the design onto the medium.
• Scrape the paint through the mesh onto the medium.
• Take off and wash.
• Enjoy your new screen print!

The tester print. It seemed to work pretty well although I didn’t get the paint as through as I would have liked.

Unfortunately, the final print on the t-shirt didn’t go as well as I had hoped - and some of the screen had come off. It still works I think - but next time I need to remember to apply the glue a little thicker.

I think it went well, and it’s not bad for a first attempt. I’m going to spend some time perfecting the screen and design (this one only took a couple of minutes) and hopefully it’ll look even better.

What do you think as a first attempt?

An excerpt from my web design sketchbook…

1. Get drunk

If you thought this would hinder the design process – you’re wrong. Nothing helps you forget about your designer’s block better than forgetting everything.

2. Get inspiration

Getting into your screenshots and look at some of your favorite designs to figure out what they did right, and how you can make it your own. (Just don’t steal)

3. Make a plan

What do you want your site to show off, when for? Which content do you think will be more important to others?

4. Sketch

Designs look their best on paper, so you might as well start there. No need for pesky colours – this is a sketch. Make revisions (about three will do).

5. Colour it!

Pick your own theme or get some ideas from kuler (I build all of my colours there).

6. Prototype time

Make a draft in photoshop and turn off anti-aliasing to see how the text will truly appear on the page. This will let you see your site before you build it and give you the images to build it properly.

7. Code it

Load up dreamweaver, type in the code, make the css and make it accessible. Well, whatever.

8. Test it

You load it up and the text is upside down, backgrounds aren’t displaying properly and the headers are gone. It happens, back to the drawing board.

9. Fix it

Time to get into the driver’s seat, find the newsgroups and the articles on google about why nothing is working. You should be able to finish this step sometime before your retirement.

10. Launch

Well, you’ve realized nothing can be perfect. Time to get some sleep – the sun’s coming up.

Since i’ve been changing and upgrading sites today, I thought i’d do it with the run down site of mine at craigmccreath[dot]com. However, just when I started to write down the css - dreamweaver crashed, and I can’t get it to start up again.

Life’s annoying like that.

Anyway, I was hoping that you could take a little time out of your busy lives and tell me how it would look.. I hope you agree with me that this would look much better than currently:-

Click to full view

Anything you think I’ve missed - I’ll be coding it today, so give me a bell.

You might have guessed it, but this site no longer holds the brown stains that it once did. That’s ‘cos I changed it.

I looked at it and it reminded me of the brown zune, nothing too spectacular to look at. I wanted to choose orange, due to the change of seasons - but since green’s my favourite colour… Might as well make it look appealing.

I’ll be making a few changes here and there over the next few days, so watch out. But something you may be happy about - Google Adsense is gone (I wasn’t making a penny) so let’s make this a better place, eh?

I’m thinking, and reading… So let’s get this party on the road shall we?

A dear friend wanted this on a t-shirt….

Should I be scared?

I got into a discussion with a friend today about the idea that we’ve always wanted to make our own t-shirts. Here in Dundee it costs a grueling £75 for a screen print session for beginners - not exactly nice on my student budget. But why not do it ourselves?

The materials are relatively cheap (a cloth store nearby as well as a Primark round the corner). I found this tutorial extremely useful in fuguring out what I’d need. I’ve used acrylic and acetate before in creating a deviantART tee a few years ago but this method ensures that the design will remain useful a lot longer (and without any nasty bleed).

Here’s my first intended design :-

I’m really interested in this - has anyone else ever done screen printing? How successful was it? Was it a DIY project gone mad? Any tips?