Web Design and Me.
# Wednesday 16th June, 2010 - 10:04pm with 3 comments
It’s funny how long I’ve been designing web design and the fact that over this period of time (10+ years) I don’t seem to have improved all that much. There is, of course, the base improvements I’ve made where content actually matters and I don’t have a page full of glitter graphics or random midis, but I still feel like everyone keeps moving forward in the design world and I lag behind.
That’s due in part to the fact that every time I get closer to a design I like I end up finding flaws in it and editing it down to basics, and end up hating it– or I overload it with fancy crap I just learned and want to dive off a cliff before it’s all over. I don’t know exactly what I’ve been doing wrong all these years, but I feel like I have a capability to learn better techniques, but I need a no-nonsense way of learning them, and at this point I lack in such tutelage.
What’s giving me most of my issue right now is the fact that I can’t get my head around coding a decent layout regularly, let alone figuring out how to convert that into the love that is WordPress– yes, folks, I would love to make a design of my own but I feel I lack the technical knowledge and ability to do so.
I have found a new tool to help me a bit with my sometimes stupidity in coding (closing tags and nesting them properly sometimes eludes me), and that is Aptana. There’s a lot more to it than I’d ever be able to explain, and there are probably some people who read my blog who might literally squee their pants off about the open-source yada and all that, but I’m completely oblivious to all that– I do know that it has plugins for me to test my layouts and helps me by reminding me to close tags and all that jazz. As demonstration, I used it today to design a new layout for Yasunori Mitsuda’s fanlisting. It came out all right, but I know I’m probably capable of better. Meh, I suck at this.