Tom’s Graphic Design Journal

Still working away on Art Chatter.
It's a site to promote the local art communities outside the cities of Philadelphia and New York City. More specifically, the towns of New Hope, Doylestown, Newtown, and the surrounding areas. It also extends into New Jersey covering Lambertville, Stockton, Frenchtown, and other areas.
The response has been great so far. Many artists have visited the site. The site contains the largest directory of galleries and artists found for the area. It will host web space and  content controlled by each artist/gallery as well. News, events, forums, books, and more will also be found on this site.

So if you're looking to take a trip, or if you live around the area, or if you just want to see some fantastic art -- stop by the site.

The project is coming along nicely. I need Google to pick it up though. I have advertised it in the AdWords and it comes up in a few other search engines. Oddly enough, Google didn't pick it up in their main search. Terrific, I even send money Google's way and they don't want to list my site. I can't imagine why. All the meta tags, everything is there. The site is search engine friendly. Oh well, I guess it will pick it up eventually. I do plan to do a lot of print advertising for artchatter as well.

Google did this to another site of mine. Tungsten Design. They just simply aren't indexing it. I'm very confused and it's been months for this site. I hear Google is becoming more picky, but I'm my sites aren't junk, they aren't spam, and they are quality sites that benefit other people. So strange. I think Google may have outdone itself...

This guy was brought to my attention and upon researching him I found out while he may be pretty fugly (I thought he played Golem in LOTR?), he's also pretty damn smart. Make that, really damn smart.

Jakob Nielsen
http://www.useit.com/papers

Some very good articles and information on that site.

Just be careful. He is a designer, but not a "graphic" designer. He doesn't understand or appreciate art. To him, most of it probably has no use, no purpose, and no meaning. That's the problem. The web is taking on a very hard programmed and technical foundation. It's technology and art...or it should be technology and art. It's becoming just technology.

It's nice to know that unless you do A, B, and C, you will have less of an effect on the viewers. It's interesting to know how to facilitate the process of receiving information, etc. It's interesting to know how fast people can obtain information from a web site and how fast they can read from the screen or double click their mouse. haha. (perverts say huh?)

So while this is all interesting, I feel it's moving things in a negative direction. Positive to the effect that we may be able to see some great and easy to use web sites. Negative in respect to that they aren't pleasing to look at.

My point about all this is, there needs to be a fine balance. What these "usability" gurus don't ever take into account is visual aesthetics. For one, it's extremely difficult to science it out. Everyone's tastes are different. Although, everyone's eyes and motor skills are different too so I assume it's just another variable like any other test would have.

What if a site is real easy to use, but really ugly? What if no one wants to come back to the site because of that? It is a fact that our eyes like visual stimulation. They like to move in circles and all around the page/screen. Of course it "wastes" time, but is it a waste when you enjoy the time spent?

I'll tell you what. If there's two sites with the same information, one being super boring in looks but super easy to access and one being very robust and beautiful but a little bit less easy to access. Which do you think will become more popular?

Actually, that's a trick question - you'll get a split response. I don't know if it'll be 50/50, because there are some people out there who don't care about the aethetics.

However, I will re-iterate my point. If a site is TOO ugly and no one comes back to see it. How "usable" is it? How "effective" is it?

Can beauty be measured? Can it be tested?

I've taken off the javascript resize feature on the site. My original intent and purpose for doing so was to eliminate the unused negative space and center the layout. I would keep this feature if it was not for the fact of accessibility problems.

It seems it crashed a browser! This I can't have. I need the site to be viewable by as many people as possible. I also understand older browsers will have a problem, but there is some point where we must put our foot down. It's impossible to have a complex design be viewable, the same, by every single browser in the world under every operating system. So if it was sacrificing design or disallowing old browsers from viewing my site...I had to go with cutting off the old guys. It has been many years since these "new" features were implemented to the point that they are no longer "new".

This of course is the entire point of my layout. It is to experiment with and take advantage of new technology. Though, not too new as such no one can view it.
So that said. The reason why I took off the resize was because it crashed someone's browser. The other reason was because of stupid spyware! Yes, it was a good point that was brought up to me that people may see it as spyware. I hate spyware so I couldn't possibly act like spyware.

This...this is why I'm not resizing your browser window now. Though it was an interesting simple little script.

I'll just resize my window so there's less negative space. I suppose I was being silly about it. I guess it really isn't that bad. Though what happens is the people who are fortunate enough to have high resolution feel the space isn't used to it's potential (and I'd have to agree) but those with lower resolutions would have problems viewing the site in a satisfying manner. So I just weighed out those options and it's not hard to deduce that it's better to have unused space for the people who want to blind themselves and keep a workable layout for those still on planet Earth.

Well, my blog is up and running. Never thought I'd create one. I already spend enough time in front of the computer.

I created a nice theme for it, though I will ultimately make another one that centers in the future. This can't be centered due to absolute positioning. So I put in a script to size and center the browser window instead.

I don't like the bulleted lists that WordPress has by default. I don't want some of these things to be bulleted. I have to go into files aside from the theme now to fix it.

So in the meantime, the site isn't 100% XHTML valid because of the lists. I'm just missing <ul> tags for the links, categories, and archives. I'm not putting them in because it will push the links out further yet another level. I don't need a super hierarchy here. I think everyone can understand what's going on. The further I push things out, the less characters that fit on a line in the cell. So screw it. It's XHTML valid. I don't think there's a browser in the world that won't view it.

Although FF and IE view it differently. FF doesn't display bullets next to the categories, the arvhives or the link categories. This almost how I'd like it to be; however, IE does put the extra bullets in. It also spaces out the lists differently. So screw that too. I will get around to fixing it.

The thing that pisses me off the most, perhaps, is that now sharing this theme for WordPress is going to be more difficult. Anyone wanting to use this theme simply can't just load it. They need to go in and make changes to files. THEN this will ultimately cause problems for the other themes.

Maybe there's a solution I can't find. Maybe it can be changed through the template. For now, I put in a good chunk of time and I'm tired.

I also added moo.fx javascript for a nice little effect. The categories and links cells can both be expanded and collapsed. I did this for two reasons. First, I wanted to try the script out a little bit. Second, I feel that blogs are very similar for the most part and can have a lot of information. So, in combination with the compact and structured design, I used the javascript to further organize. This creates for a more easy to view site.

There's two things I don't like about the moo.fx. First, you can't resize these div boxes if they have scroll bars. So while I wanted this main post box to be able to be expanded to the right...I can't. This would have made the site even more simplistic and easy to read. If you didn't want to see all the extra stuff, you could've just been reading the article. Then simply change back.

I will probably encorporate an idea like that into the next theme I do. Which would have to include browser window scrolling. I like the self contained window without the need to scroll sections you don't need to be. This makes sure that the navigation buttons are always within reach without using frames which are limiting and often ugly.

So that said...Welcome to my blog! You'll find a lot of interesting thoughts here. Trust me. My mind doesn't turn off. So this is also a place for me to jot down notes and discoveries. That means that nifty search box will be getting a lot of use...At least by me.

Enjoy!

Type Tester
http://typetester.maratz.com

This web site is a very handy tool for figuring out fonts for your web site.
The site works off of em measurements.
One important piece of information, which you have to dig for, is that your body tag should have font-size: 62.5%. Unless of course that is you work with em measurements everyday. What this does is it simply converts it to a 10px base. Therefore every 1em is 10px.

I'm unsure why px just isn't used, but I'm sure it has something to do how different browsers handle em vs. px.

This is just one small step for web design and advanced control over typography. While this isn't anything new, it certainly is something highly overlooked.