so fruitsy

Yay! Completely new layout finally! *grin* I started this layout some time in May, hadn’t really touched it until yesterday when I touched it up and coded it. (I got held up by wanting to add a custom Flickr feed, but that never happened, soooo…)

Yes, I actually used bright colors in my layout! I carried out my threat (last paragraph) with my inspiration of “candy colors.” :3 Although I think the colors will bug me after a while … right now I think the pink and purple are too close on the color wheel, leaving the green as a glaring complement and the most eye-catching part of the design. Bah!

It’s interesting, I went to Colour Lovers when I first started in order to find my “candy colors,” but I couldn’t find any! All the colors were of the dark, muted variety. Nothing bright and fun and, erm, eye-popping. So I ended up using my own colors I came up with.

Another complaint, the color appearance differs so much between my laptop and my desktop computer. grrrs. They’re so much more light and pastel-y on my desktop, and dark and saturated on my laptop. :( Now I question how awful they look on others’ computer screens. Hopefully no one gets eyestrain trying to read my blog!

new layout—third try

Yes, new layout. Bahaha. Take three on the jester and monk theme. Am questioning right now the three column headers (“side”, “blog”, and “currently”), the huuge type size in the domain title, and well, the whole thing looks a bit silly to me. Buuut … it is too late to do anything now.

I have a whole week of work to look forward to, and I still have not written that post on my Disneyland trip. Things are beginning to leak out of my memory!

Also, did not have much of a weekend. Yesterday was spent on cars (repairs, not buying) and today was spent on a cat (again, fixing, not getting a new one). Ah well.

I think my life would go better if I had more sleep. But then I’d lead a life of not doing much but sleeping and working … bah.

try always

Tweaked the layout, so now it’s more normalish and not all above the fold with scrolling divs. Yay! Not sure how I like how it looks in 800×600 resolutions though. (The sidebar goes all the way to the bottom of the page in order to not create a horizontal scrollbar. :/)

Um, I noticed that in the “Write Post” page of WordPress, the selected categories are no longer at the top of the list… Why was that changed? I was a little annoyed when they first switched from alphabetizing all categories regardless of if they were selected to having selected categories on the top, but I got over that. It was very handy knowing without having to scroll what categories I’d placed the post under.

It’s doubly annoying now because the Categories window is so freaking tiny now. (Height-wise, I mean.) Scroll a little bit and I can barely see where the window scrolled to. Three lines? Five lines? I can never tell! Very disorienting.

edit: Vote for this idea! “Revert the 2.5 Write screen to 2.3”

the jester and the monk went out one night

New layout. Yay! After I complained in some previous post that I had no inspiration for a new layout I went out to a scrapbooking store (for class supplies) and saw a paper design that I liked (the diamond pattern) so I matched it up with this image I’d found earlier while on the lookout for old woodcuts (for class). I like it all right at the moment. Will probably tire of it soon. But I think I can wrangle the layout into a non-overflow one once that happens.

I still have to work on style for the text. It’s what kept me from making this post yesterday when the layout went up, but since I spent most of today working on my book (for the same class mentioned previously), I never got around to finishing it, and would rather say yay new layout before it’s done than a few days after it first went up.

I’ll probably split the “sidebar” into three sections instead of two. I’ll probably toss in the RSS feed from LibraryThing and Last.fm. I feel somehow like I’m following the latest trend by doing that, but oh well. It’ll make this blog look less abandoned in between posts. XD;

I also want to add a colophon. Why? I’m a dork I guess. I love the idea of it. I first read one in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I had no idea what it was, but I liked knowing what typeface they used. It edged me a little bit deeper into loving book design. *grin*

taken for granted

Must … update … blog.

After about five or six hours coding this layout, from 12 pm (an hour after I woke up) on, I have to say I don’t like this layout as much as I’d hoped. I couldn’t do it the way I’d wanted (background images on top and bottom), so there’s lots of extra space around the boxes. murrr.

Now the colors are looking funny to me, not as nice and soft and pretty as they first were. I also just realized that I forgot to check the colors on my desktop (colors on my laptop look waaaay different from any desktop), so I don’t know how funky they really are.

But meh. No more ugly pink color and tiny box area to scroll through.

Group presentation yesterday in art was all right. Eddie Izzard was nicely received. (Her Engelbert Humperdinck bit was used to illustrate idea selection.)

The earlier part of the day was spent uninstalling and reinstalling my printer, in an attempt to get back my ability to print InDesign documents with the Composite CMYK setting. I don’t know why it takes so long to install a printer. Rather, I don’t know why it takes so long for the installer to realize that there’s just no way the website is going to be found to self-register the product, so just move on in the process already! But whatever. It didn’t work. Still can only print in Composite Grey or Composite RGB. I have no freakin’ clue why.

The HP website (I have a Deskjet 4160) has a support page about printer settings not available in InDesign, but for Macs. (Funny, I never thought of hooking Macs up to regular printers. All the ones I’ve dealt with as of late were hooked up to fancy printers with RIPs, if any.) I don’t even want to fashion that “help” to my own situation, because they suggest overriding InDesign print settings and going through the HP print settings dialogue. Ouch! No way!

The Adobe website has a topic in the InDesign support forum for Macs, but that was about an Epson printer, and a somewhat fancy one, not my dinky $60 one. The response there is that a lot of inkjet printers print with RGB or something, which I find truly odd, so might as well go with the Composite RGB. Or buy a really fancy RIP that’ll convert to CMYK for you. Right.

A couple weeks ago when trying to find a solution through Google I saw this page, an entry in a blog with a similar situation but also involving Illustrator. I can’t seem to find it now though. Someone commented saying he’s had that problem, and that he always just … does something involving the printer. I can’t remember. Removes the printer from the settings, I don’t know. Which is why I went through that whole mess this morning. But it didn’t work.

I think, I’m not sure, that this problem occurred after I changed color settings or color profiles or something in InDesign. I don’t know how or what to change the settings back to. I did synchronize color settings in Adobe Bridge though. I don’t know what that did really, but hey I got a little note about it so I did it hoping it would fix my problem. It didn’t. So I am stuck saving files as PDFs and printing through there.

(I don’t know why I don’t want to print RGB. It’s stuck in my mind that if it’s for print, I should stay away from RGB. Apparently the CMYK color gamut is smaller than the RGB gamut. I experienced that when I didn’t realize the picture for my movie poster was in RGB. Augh. But tha’s neither here nor there. What I want to say is that if I’ve designed something in CMYK [technically; I set up colors in the program using CMYK, but I am looking at the colors in RGB on the monitor], I feel that it would be just plain weird to print with Composite RGB to a printer that uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.)

Hmm … just read more topics at the Adobe InDesign support forum, and it was explicitly spelled out that only postscript printers accept CMYK. So what was I doing before? O_o

Another note: the funky colors are probably a result of me tilting my screen more than I had earlier this morning or last night. XD;; Wow, I really need sleep.

10:04pm The dawning light! (After looking up “inkjet printer cmyk rgb.”) Inkjet printers expect RGB since that’s what the general public would work in, and has a driver in the printer to convert to CMYK. But that brings up the question … how was I able to print CMYK?