General – Page 26 – Letter Never Sent

Tips on Getting Started With Web Design

Designing and creating websites is not difficult. As with anything else, with enough practice, experience and knowledge of the basics anyone can be a “web designer”. The important thing is to start somewhere and work from there. Here are a few suggestions:

Learn basic HTML. HTML is not a programming language. Writing HTML is not programming. Disavow yourself of this idea immediately. It only creates a mental barrier for people like me who are intimidated by math and programming. While HTML has some things in common with classic programming languages (like the use of its own rules and syntax), it is better to think of it as a formatting language since you’re just using HTML to change the appearance of what would normally be just text and pictures. The great part is HTML is super simple. Really. If you’re a total newb where HTML is concerned bookmark w3schools.com. They have great beginning tutorials and even little sandboxes where you can write and render (view the output) HTML all in one place.
Practice, practice, practice. Build your own starter website. Volunteer to build one for someone else. This is how everyone starts out. It’s fun, low pressure, and it’s for yourself. Make a website where you can putter around and change things any time you feel like it. Don’t hold yourself to an unrealistic standard by comparing your site to everyone else’s. Remember, you’re just a beginner, and you have a lot to learn. You’re going to make a lot of crap before you make something halfway decent. When we’re kids, we all start out drawing stick figures and sausage-headed people. Then gradually, with practice, you start filling in the blanks and progressing. It’s the same thing here. Don’t start out comparing yourself to the people who’ve been doing this stuff for 15 years. If you stay after it, you can be be better than 90% of people within days or weeks.
“Plus it.” The biggest thing that will help you progress with designing and building web pages is knowing when something does or does not look good. I’m not talking about having good taste. I’m talking about knowing when something looks like crap. If you have high standards for how something should look, it will drive you so crazy when something does NOT look good that you will push yourself to figure out how to make it look better. This sense of dissatisfacton is central to the learning process. Walt Disney had a standard phrase he used to squeeze the best work out of his artists. He would tell them to “Plus it.” Even if you think something looks pretty good, “plus it”. Push it a little more.
~~Steal~~ Learn from other people. As the old saying goes, good artists borrow, great artists steal. Everything you need to learn, someone else has already learned. Use their knowledge and benefit from their experience. Don’t just borrow what other people know, steal it and make it your own. If you see something cool someone has done, right click their webpage and “View source” to see how they did it. This shows you the unrendered source code, which is the blueprint for how a website is put together. Acquaint yourself with every good resource you can get your hands on and soak it up. I’m a big believer in mental osmosis. If you listen to other people talk and write about something long enough, you’ll gradually pick up little lessons and bits of knowledge and experience. Here are a few places that will speed your education: Webmasterworld (a great place to ask questions and lurk), StyleGala (check out what the cool designers are building), A List Apart (the unofficial academic journal for ‘web designers’). There are tons of other equally good places. Just start reading and cribbing from your fellows. 99% of the ‘web designers’ out there are unremarkable (myself included). Do not be intimidated.
Know a few good tricks. Most web designers have a bag of tricks they use over and over. Little things like how to build a website that looks good, but is actually very simple. For example, check out Cameron Moll’s pretty website. As a well-known web designer, he knows how to make things look pretty sharp, but if you look closely you’ll see that his site is actually not that complex. It’s basically a header image, a background, and a two column CSS layout. There are a few complexities, but it doesn’t get much easier than that. If you look at this project he did recently, you’ll see that he uses many of the same tricks. While the site looks very nice, the actual architecture is not that difficult. It’s a navigation element, a large header, and three columns beneath the header. Cameron’s most effective trick is that he’s a whiz with Photoshop, which makes everything else he does look pretty snazzy. Most good designers are very good with Photoshop. I highly recommend spending lots of time in that application as it can account for 60-75% of your success with clients and projects. In my experience, most of the actual ‘designing’ is concepted and performed within Photoshop anyway. I don’t even mess with the HTML part of a project until everything is created in Photoshop. This guy has a similar workflow, which he outlines here. Buy, borrow, or steal a copy of Photoshop if you don’t already have one. It’s a necessary tool that everyone uses.
You don’t need books or classes. You need to work. Some people will inevitably disagree with this, but I think books and classes (especially on web design) are almost universally worthless. Why? In any class, you are usually either way behind or way ahead of everyone else. This is a bad place to be. The teacher’s job is to make sure everyone gets through the class together, so you’ll usually only end up learning the very basics. Someone else is always more stupid than you are and holding everyone back. Furthermore, most people who write books and teach classes are not that great. The great designers are out designing and creating. Writers on the other hand are not paid to simplify and teach a subject. They’re paid to trick people into buying massive, expensive books that have no resale value. Most truly great designer / writers freely part with their pearls of wisdom to any with the ears to listen. They’re not interested in foisting more unreadable, unnecessary garbage onto the world to further confuse people who just want to learn. There are a few good classes worth taking, but try very hard to learn on your own first. If you spend 1-2 hours a day just playing around building webpages and graphics, you will eventually learn everything you need to know.

I hope you find some of these tips useful. Remember that you can do anything anyone else can do. Do not be afraid to make mistakes or ask questions.

General / Society / Software / Internet — 1 Comment
13
Apr 06

Martin Random: Bullshit Genius or White House Insider?

This guy is either a great liar or he knows some things. It doesn’t have to be true to be entertaining. Be sure to read the whole thread. From Something Awful:

Homeland security buys in bulk and at great premium millions of dollars of useless personal appliances from China, such as rice cookers, nose hair trimmers, massage wands, and heating pads, boxes them up, and buries them in railroad shipping containers in the Arizona desert for no reason whatsoever other than to spend its budget and prevent sub-agencies from getting the funds. I suspect that the money goes to a middleman in order to secretly siphon funds into foreign organizations which we can’t support over the table, but this is just me trying to find a justification for this massive and intentional government waste.

Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he’s gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.

Business / General / Society / Technology — 2 Comments
12
Apr 06

Solutions to Laptop Theft

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story recently on an increase in laptop theft in San Francisco coffee houses. One victim was stabbed in the chest for his laptop during a recent robbery.

Lynch said people working on the high-priced computers are easy targets. “You walk by any Starbucks and you see people with a laptop, it’s so tempting for the crooks. They walk in, right on top of the person, and the person has all their attention on the laptop. They snatch it right out from underneath their fingertips. ‘

It’s surprising that there aren’t more incidents of laptop theft considering how expensive laptops can be, especially a nice Mac with titanium case and 17″ LCD. There are tons of people out there who walk around with thousands of dollars in their bags: laptops, ipods, digicams, etc. Luckily, there are a couple of options out there to help prevent laptop theft:

Get a laptop cable lock. Lock down your laptop with a cable lock that snaps into a specially designed loop on most laptops. Then loop the cable around something that can’t be moved. Unless thieves threaten you with body violence this is a good solution since it actually prevents theft.
Install Laptop Lojack. There’s a company called Computrace that makes a product by the name of Lojack for Laptops. They even licensed the name and everything. The idea behind it is simple: as soon as your laptop is stolen, you call the police to file a police report then you call Computrace and they set your laptop into “I’ve been stolen” mode. Basically, once the stolen laptop is connected to the Internet it sends notifications back to Computrace that help pinpoint its location by using the IP address, which is tied to your physical address. Computrace then notifies the police with information sufficient to serve as a search warrent. This is a good solution unless the thief wipes the hard drive before he connects to the Internet. Computrace has partnered with Lenovo, the maker of IBM Thinkpads, which now include the Computrace software on the actual BIOS chip. So, even if the hard-drive is wiped the software is still able to run and report back when stolen. Eventually all laptops could include something like this. Computrace claims that 90% of the laptops its customers report lost or stolen are either recovered or the data on them is destroyed using remote commands.
For Mac Users: Orbicule Undercover. Orbicule makes a similar program called Undercover that dials home when the laptop has been stolen. It also features support for iSight if you have a built-in webcam and will take snapshots of the thief. One interesting feature is that it simulates a hardware failure by gradually darkening the screen. The hope is that if the laptop is sent to Apple for repairs and connects to the Internet while at Apple, Undercover will detect the network settings and launch a special screen with instructions on how to return the stolen laptop to its rightful owner. It’s a novel approach, but who knows how well that works.

General — Comments Off
11
Apr 06

Changes in store

Some separation is in order. Starting today, all new personal blog entries will be written at www.sivori.org. All other content will remain here. The goal is to turn letterneversent.com into more of a topical resource with longer essay style blog entries rather than having a mix of the personal day to day and the topical. The two readerships (or potential readerships, rather) are not likely to overlap. We’ll experiment with it.

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11
Apr 06

Let’s talk about feet

This weekend I went shoe shopping. I was looking for some slip-on shoes. Something semi-casual and comfortable for the summer I could wear to work, with jeans, and with shorts. Even without socks. We went into Nordstrom’s where they do shoes pretty well except for their lack of sneaker selection. I looked at some top-siders, but those are too 80’s-michael-p-keaton. I checked out a couple things and the salesman measured my feet with that slidey deal (It’s called a Brannock Device). Apparently the staff at Nordstrom’s are certified shoe fitters. That’s what the sign says. Anyway, this guy measured my feet and I learned I’ve been wearing shoes that are too small, and I’ve done this my whole adult life. By length, my feet are longer than I thought anyway, being size 12’s. I guess I haven’t measured in a while. The interesting part is that the toe length is not the important part. You have to measure using the ball of your foot. That’s where the little knob on the Brannock Device comes in handy. Most people have never used that part. Since the ball (where your big toe knuckle sticks out) is the widest part of your foot this is the most important aspect when buying comfortable shoes as shoes tend to narrow at the toe. You want to make sure the widest part of your foot is comfortably situated into the widest part of the shoe. If the ball is forward due to a lack of arch, etc. it will push into the toebox of the shoe where the shoe narrows making your feet feel cramped. Taking the ball into consideration I should have been wearing a size 13 1/2. Anyway, I bought these leather “driving moccasins” that are nice and flat. I’ve been padding around the office all morning.

asides — Comments Off
11
Apr 06

Untitled

Good Cat & Girl comic today. Oh, Evelyn.

Learnding: Expression Engine video tutorials

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10
Apr 06

Buy the Crude Oil ETF To Hedge Your Gas Bill (ETF: USO)

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07
Apr 06

Hierarchies and networks

How to tap your company’s hidden network: Forget the IT network. It’s a company’s human infrastructure that really determines whether it lives or dies:

Woe to the person who doesn’t understand the trust network in his or her company, she tells the generals, whose attention is now becoming more focused. Ignore this hidden structure and your quality team players will jump ship, mentors will abandon their charges, institutional memory will vanish, and glad-handing schmucks will weasel their way into power. But if you fathom how your company really works, you can identify and reward your most valuable employees and unearth innovative ideas.

Stephenson is a leader in the growing field of social-network business consultants. As happens today with the generals, her ideas usually manage to command attention. Anyone who has worked in any organization knows there’s at least some truth to what she says.

Humans are primates, after all, and we groom each other through sharing information. Organizations are constantly abuzz with thousands of shared confidences, whispered at the water cooler or between buddies in the bowling league. Taken together, those communications make up a kind of dark matter of corporate culture–an unseen force that has significant influence on whether everything holds together or flies apart.

I think many of us can identify with this:

And yet Stephenson, despite her faith in the power of social networks, has a confession to make. “The truth is that with all my talk of networks, I’m really a closet hierarchist,” she says. “I like hierarchies because they’re clear. Nothing is ever totally clear in a social network because they’re always in motion.”

Which might explain why Stephenson so enjoys working alone. “There is no clearer hierarchy than a business of one,” she says. “I’m free, and I can’t tell you how happy I am.”

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05
Apr 06

Gene Pitney has died

Gene Pitney found dead in hotel. “Cause the point of a gun was the only law That Liberty understood.
When it came to shootin’ straight and fast, He was mighty good.”

Apple Introduces Boot Camp: Public Beta Software Enables Intel-based Macs to Run Windows XP. AAPL is up 6%.

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the old stuff