Chapter 12, What You See is What You Get

I've created a website for myself with Google's Page Creator. I needed to get my portfolio (or at least part of it) online and figured that Google's WYSIWYG editor would do just fine until I can make something of my own.

8 Bit Artist is a friend's portfolio/website that I coded--the design is his. I enjoy making websites, but they are very time consuming. What's worse is that most of the work is hidden from your visitors and difficult to explain to someone who does not do the work themselves.

When I am designing a site my friends and family frequently become annoyed with me, or bored, or both, as I excitedly explain the new CSS trick that I learned and used, or how I defeated the annoying rendering scheme used by Internet Explorer in order to make my site display correctly.

There's something about building a website that is a lot like building a model, only with out the citrus-y stench of model glue): I work with Notepad, for the most part, and code everything by hand, so it's exciting when I render a page and see the pieces of my design come together to make something that's functional, that you can move around, but that looks like a work of art (at least, that's what I aspire to).

I don't know how that's like building a model, but that analogy made sense to me when I first typed it.

Chapter 6, "Take the Painting and Run"

The following is from Le Gentil Garçon.

There's something about the work shown on this site and even the site design itself that makes me smile. I thought I would share. I truly do wish that I could read French.

Look for "Take and Run," "Street Spirits" and "Snowmen" under the "works" section of the site.

Chapter 5, Everything Orange

The following is exerted from the MB Web Design Blog:

#2 - "Just one more small change…"

Though it seems trivial to "change everything from red to orange," you might have to change a PSD or PNG file, export all the slices, modify the stylesheet, modify some other details to complement the new colour… the list goes on. Only for the client to say "nah, I don’t like the orange. Make it red again."

In his or her blog entry, Nightmare Web Design Clients, the author describes many of the most common mistakes made by web design clients and how these mistakes impact their designer.

I have only been working in freelance design for about a year-and-a-half, but I've been working in the design industry for nearly thirteen years. While some of the specifics do change the ultimate facts are the same:

1. One can never charge enough for the amount of work that ultimately goes into any creative endeavor and truly feel financially rewarded.
2. In the end, your client is your customer and customers are always right--even when they're wrong.