mariuszciesla.com

Sketching...

Let’s be honest - most (if not all) of graphic designs done by me come from sketching. When I was a kid, I was never taught more than elementary basics of art at school, but I loved to take my pen and sketch. Now when I’m a designer, sketching is an essential part of every design I make. It doesn’t matter if I do just a quick mock-up of what will be where or a full proof design for my newest graphic design work - the pencil (or the pen) is the first thing I always look at when preparing for a new design.

I also always carry a pencil and a sketchbook with me, because you never know when the idea will come. From my experience I know that sometimes when I completely lack idea of how something should be done, I just pack a pencil and a sketchbook to my backpack and go for my daily routine - bus, walk, office, school et caetera. Sometimes I just pass a building, an advert or a man and suddenly an idea appears - then I’m glad that my pencil and sketchbook have not failed me and are there when I need them.

So, to all you young designers out there - even if you’re doing graphics for the web only and think Illustrator/Photoshop is everything you may possibly need - never leave your pencil behind. It helps you stay creative even in the hardest times.

I bought myself a toy.

Well, I dug photography for a long time. For a long time I was doing photos with analog cameras, on film and such. One day I decided to go into Minolta system and I bought myself Maxxum 70, which I was very happy of. Then the age of analog photography started to fade, prices of films were higher and higher due to termination of some very known films like Konica or Fuji and I stopped doing photos. I lacked money to buy myself DSLR since they were crazy expensive here. And there I was - me, my Minolta Maxxum 70, my Minolta XD-11 (very old one, my father used to take photos with it) and bunch of quite good lenses. Minolta changed to Konica-Minolta and then was bought by Sony. Nobody knew what will happen to the famous A* system. Sony released A100 which wasn’t a smash hit, but got quite a good market and went silent. People were confused.

And then Sony announced two new DSLRs the higher semi-pro A700 and the lower semi-pro A350. I decided to buy one. A700 still was crazy expensive for me so I got myself A350. I bought myself a toy. I started taking pictures again. Damn. I missed that. Now I plan to buy myself couple of new lenses, a vertical grip and take a dive into portraiture photography once again.

I feel happy.

Sliding doors? Ok, but only properly.

Probably everyone that is somehow connected to the XHTML/CSS development, uses and loves the Sliding Doors Technique for expanding tabs, buttons, dialogs and such, though from many experience I see that not many people uses this correctly.

Currently I work on a project, where designer is apparently in love with rounded corners, so everyone uses the sliding doors wherever possible, doing this completely wrong — honestly, when I see million divs stacked just to end with empty content, I’m struggling with the urge to slit somebody’s wrists with a blunt object. Therefore I’d just wanted to ask some developers out there: use sliding doors wisely. Thank you.

More bragging on new Netvibes.

Well, now that I use Netvibes Ginger quite for a while, another few thoughts.

1. I will probably never use the new social thingy. I tried to add some activities (still can’t figure out why it’s called that way), but I don’t seem to see a clue in it. Why use it? I would greatly appreciate any answer.
2. I made old modules (“Revised Daily Comics” yaay!) work thru the UWA module interface. It seems the backward compatibility is better than I thought.
3. It’s terribly slow, but you can get used to it (if you don’t trigger actions that require modal pop-ups which are slow and crappy as hell)
4. I like the tab-to-URL feature (typing netvibes.com/tab_name and Netvibes open on the tab you wanted), small thing, but neat.
5. I didn’t use the public Universe feature yet but plan to make it a one-stop-shop for webdesigners that are interested in what I do and where I find things to do it right.

Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV

Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails, the band that doesn’t need introduction, released their new album “Ghosts I-IV” for download. You can choose wheter you want to download first 9 tracks for free, buy all 36 tracks in 320kbps DRM-free MP3 or lossless Apple or lossless FLAC format, or get a real-life 2xCD box set for $10 straight from their website.

I think that’s a very smart move by Trent, and more bands should follow. Everyone knows, that people like to test before they buy, so why not download few free tracks for free and then buy all of them (or the original 2xCD box set) cheaper than in any record shop?

The only question remains — when will first 192VBR, crappy pirate releases made of $5 downloaded album be available on BitTorrent trackers? ;)

First thoughts on new Netvibes

Today I’ve migrated my Netvibes account to new beta version (Ginger). Some quick thoughts:

1. It’s terrifying slow. Here at the office on an fairly new iMac + 2 gigs of RAM, all those web two-point-oh trendy fade-ins and fade-outs are chopppy like a turtle on reverse.
2. It’s terribly whitespaced. New skins for Netvibes are not good - I’m having a lot of RSS feeds connected to one tab and with the whitespaces and huge headers, it takes just too much space. I reverted to the oldschool skins.
3. Create new activity. What exactly is ‘activity’ by Netvibes? I thought it’s just starring RSS articles as favorites Google Reader’s style — and the pop-up said it’s “saving the activity”. What is activity? I just want to bookmark an RSS article, for Christ’s sake!
4. Some of the old modules (like my favorite “Revised Daily Comics”) do not work. Not backward-compatible?

utype initial commit

utype’s initial commit pushed to github.com (private repository, since there’s not really much there, just plain merb installation).

Does it mean we have started the project at last? ;)