Bottled Sky

It looks like my plan to rid myself of designer’s block worked. I made five layouts in the last two weeks and am now more than halfway through my huge backlog of design projects. Go me!

The first three designs are grossly belated birthday gifts for my college friends. I was broke last year, so instead of buying cheap gifts that I wouldn’t want for myself, I promised to make new layouts for those who had blogs or LJs. I’m still broke, so the question is, what will I make for them this year?

Anyway, the fourth is for our group blog, and the last is a streamlined, resume-appropriate version of my portfolio. Check them out! Links and screen shots (as well as a few web design questions that I’m hoping you coding gurus can answer) are after the jump.

Continue reading Finally Making Progress »

What do you get when you combine copious amounts of instant coffee with an ill-conceived plan to rid oneself of designer’s block? A new theme!

I’ve been in some kind of design funk this past couple of months, and I’ve had just about enough. I figured that the best way to crawl out of it was to impose a deadline, so I decided to force myself to participate in the Spring 2007 Reboot with only one-and-a-half days left. As you can see, I somehow managed to squeak through, albeit several hours off target. I blame my fandoms for distracting me

Anyway, this layout is entitled “Breathe” — as in “breathe easy” or “room to breathe” and not “the exagerated sound Darth Vader makes when he exhales.” I was experimenting with different drawing styles when I came up with the illustration I used for this layout. I loved how the swirls in her hair turned out, so I decided to make a theme out of it.

This is actually my second attempt at creating a layout around that drawing. I started working on the first version almost four months ago, but I lost interest in the design before I could even finish it. It looked quite different from this one — all soft and quiet with its pale pinks and minty greens. Hmm. Now that I think about it, maybe the reason I lost interest in the first version was that it wasn’t anything like me. Needless to say, I like this one a lot better, or it would have ended up in the reject pile, too.

Let me know what you think! Like it? Hate it? Found bugs crawling about?

As for my designer’s block, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ve broken through it. I definitely won’t be ready for another caffeinated cramming session anytime soon.

Tomorrow I’m going on a 5-day trip to Baguio with my relatives on my mother’s side. It’s been at least a decade since I last vacationed with my extended family, so it’s bound to be interesting. I’m actually looking forward to it. At the very least, Baguio’s cool climate will be a welcome escape from the stifling Manila heat.

I’m also seeing this trip as a chance to detox, so to speak. No Internet, no caffeine, no staying up all night and sleeping during the day. I’ll take pictures, draw, finish that book I’ve been meaning to read, eat strawberries, and maybe get to know my cousins — unless of course the withdrawal symptoms hit me so hard that I’d have to be driven to the nearest Internet cafe and attached to an intravenous coffee drip

On a totally unrelated note, I really want one of these:

It’s The Ex Knife Holder from Think Geek. Now that’s what I call catharsis.

My LiveJournal has been “smoochified.” I normally don’t do mushy, but I came across this old drawing of mine and felt the urge to use it in a layout:

I added the style sheet to the LJ themes page in case anyone else wants it. I had a few drops of creative juice left over after finishing the layout, so I made a bunch of icons as well.

In other news, my mom is now a blogger. I guess everyone and his mother really does have a blog these days She chose Mrs. B for her screen name and refers to my dad as Mr. B and me as Miss B in her entries. I love it, haha!

To my knowledge, my dad has yet to join the blog-wagon. He does visit this site regularly, though. (Hi, Dad!) Sometimes we’d be eating dinner and he’d say, “By the way, in your links page you missed an ‘I’ in ‘visiting.’” Who needs Spell Check when you have a perfectionist father going over your website?

I began writing when I was five years old, typing short stories on my mom’s office computer. I wrote about rude rabbits and pigs with wigs and fancied myself the next Enid Blyton, whose books I used to collect. I later discovered poetry and penned many a bad rhyme. And then came the “junior journalist” phase, where I joined essay writing contests and became a staffer for the school paper. Growing up, I was so often told that I had potential for writing by both biased (my mom) and unbiased (teachers — they didn’t like me because I was a lazy underachiever) authority figures that I thought it must be true.

Here’s the truth, though. Even now that I have successfully earned a Journalism degree, I still can’t decide whether I like writing or not. While there are times when I feel the urge to just write, I usually struggle so much with it that I wonder if I’m even having fun. It’s rare for me to come up with a piece of writing that I’m satisfied with, and even when I do I still cringe every time I see someone reading what I wrote.

It’s drastically different from what I experience with my other hobbies. Even when it takes me days to complete a layout or finish a drawing, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m enjoying what I’m doing. And I’m always proud of the end product and eager to show it to anyone who’s interested, whether I’m completely happy with it or not.

However, this is also true: for all of my creative pursuits, I always appreciate a good critique. I don’t mean good as in positive, but as in detailed and specific. I’ve attended writing workshops where they figuratively ripped my assignments apart, but I’ve found those sessions very helpful and even enjoyable. Not all reviews I’ve received were useful, though, particularly those that came from people who 1) didn’t really know what they were talking about and 2) didn’t take into account what I was trying to do with my piece and simply made suggestions based on his own vision. For me a useful critique is one that points out issues I might have missed and helps steer the piece closer to where I want it to go.

Kimmie‘s recent review of Skylight was definitely useful. I requested her to critique this site after reading her well-written article on website reviews. Her suggestions helped me address many issues that had been bothering me before. The features section is now more organized and the index page less cluttered thanks to her. Next step: a more flexible CMS. I seriously need to move on from Blogger. Any suggestions?

In other news, I recently made two kid-inspired layouts, one for my candy-loving friend Kathy, the other for my LJ. What can I say? I have a lot of free time these days, being a bum and all I’m just resting a little before I go into full-on work mode after the holidays.