Work in progress...

I’ve recently picked up the necessary skillset needed to make my own WordPress themes. Having done a couple for work, I’m now ready to do one for myself. It’s going to make heavy use of CSS3 stuff and will probably look like ass in Internet Explorer, but you know what? I don’t care. Barely anyone looks at my blog anyhow, haw haw. Except me, and I look at it in Firefox or Safari. Nobody should be using IE anyhow; it’s a piece of garbage full of security holes and has shitty CSS support. Ridiculous.

Here’s a sneaky preview of what I’ve got done so far. I’m working on the codin’ part. Next, I’ll slice it up for WordPress, enter additional bits of PHP needed to make it work, and hopefully: voila! My very own fancy customized WordPress template. It will make use of stock imagery and the world’s most favorite typeface, Museo, and its many variants (slab, sans) as well as Museo’s BFF, Calluna. The cats are from istockphoto.com (one download credit per cat; I had bought credits a while ago for a freelance job and I had some to burn). Still have a bunch to do, but it’s taking shape quite nicely. I’m hoping to finish it up over the weekend. That’s how I celebrate American independence: with website work!

After pledging to do this for about five years, I’ve started to collect all of the websites, illustrations, posters, and other publications or products I’ve made and assemble these together in portfolio fashion. Looking at things I did ten years ago or more (or less) is interesting and often cringe-worthy. My favorite thing is stumbling upon some super-introspective thing that I wrote where I was totally trying to sound like I was all down-to-earth and not into myself and humble, but in the process made myself seem like the greatest of douches instead. Ugh. So embarrassed. Also high-larious was finding myself using an SAT word, no doubt to sound all deep and insightful, and then spelling it wrong. D’oh!

Anyhow, the folio of ports can be found here.

Something else I’ve done lately is mess around with TypeKit. TypeKit’s a service that gets you using typefaces from different foundries on your website in a legal and ethical manner. I shelled out $25 for the more-than-free-less-than-pro version so I could use a particular font that I got sweet on. Here is my site with TypeKit in use. By the by, my plan for this is to set up a WordPress blog on ladybot.net and then organize all of my portfolio stuff there using the Gallery2 plugin for WordPress. Sure, I could do the same thing here, but that’s…  well… never you mind! I gotta do something with these domain names.

Courtesy of a Livejournal post by my pal EK, here’s a sketch I did on this neat web application called Odosketch. It’s this spiffy Flash-based drawin’ board and comes from the design agency Odopod.

I also did a sketch of Ga-ko, my beloved clock and first wedding anniversary present from my husband.

I love stuff like this. I wish I didn’t have such a crummy Wacom tablet. It doesn’t flow smoothly. I might just be crummy at using it, too. Heh. I never could get used to using a tablet and pen…

The only caveat is not to get too attached to anything you create with Odosketch. From the site TOCS:

Odopod Rights to Your Posting. Your User Generated Content is not confidential or proprietary. You grant to Odopod a non-exclusive, non-revocable, worldwide, perpetual right to use your User Generated Content in any manner or media now or later known without limitation including but not limited to the right to sublicense and assign and commercialize without any compensation due to you.

Kind of stinky. Still fun, though.