Whew!

Just a quick note since it's on my mind and it's a perfect time to illustrate what I have been saying:

I have worked with a template for like the past two hours. I am not sure that I am going to use this template, but it's impossible to know how it is going to look without populating the fields. To those ends, I have been copying and pasting and typing randomly. But even with the fields populated, I have to arrange them as though I really were going to use this template because, obviously, I'm not going through all of this to just throw it up here all shithouse; I have to see what it is going to look like to know if I want to use it.

This, again, is one, single template; I have about a dozen that I am considering!

Of course, I am not going to spend as much time on all of them as I have with this one. Some of them I can pretty much dismiss outright, though I do want to fiddle with them, just to see what I come up with (that's how some of the best stuff happens). Others are so similar, I just work with one of them and then lift everything off it to the other.

But these are just the very basics of the whole matter. Once I am pleased with the layout and placement, it's on to the color scheme. And color schemes are a real bitch because many of the elements are individually handled; every ad you see on this blog has a hand-fashioned color scheme (if I can control it) - a process which has been known to take me entire days (and I'm still not pleased with those here)! You choose the color of the background, text, title, border - everything... after that, there's the font sets.

For those of you who are not designers, take a look at The Weirding homepage: there are about a half-dozen fonts on that page. If it's hard to tell, then I did my job; this is one of those key design elements that is almost impossible to tell as a viewer unless I, as the designer, get it wrong - in which case, it's impossible to overlook. The titles, headings, captions, and body text all need to be different - but not too different - yet remain consistent. Unfortunately, I am not in control of all the fonts that appear on the page (such as those used in the ads), so I am somewhat limited as to how far I can go.

We have all been to a website where the designer just threw the thing together and used the basic Arial, Verdana fonts - these are the basic, default fonts for all sites, all pages, all browsers, across the Web (because all computers have them and see them the same, regardless of operating system, platform, browser, etc.) - and the page/site looks completely flat, cheesy, generic, and... spammy!

We all have also seen the sites where the designer just learned HTML and bought a $10 CD full of "100,000 FONTS!" And every, damn word is a different font and size and none of them work together, so every, single thing on the page stands-out like a sore thumb because they all stand-apart from one another.

This is what I am talking about when I say I'm "working, but you might not be able to tell it," or "I am doing behind-the-scenes stuff," and so on. It may sound like a pack of excuses because I say it so often, but as you see, there is a hell of a lot involved - I mean, it's a real, real job! - and a simple, seemingly insignificant, little detail becomes a glaring inconsistency when published.

If I were just going to half-ass it, then I wouldn't even bother. And I haven't - I haven't messed with anything for months because I knew I lacked the time and attention-span to do it right. Now I am seriously working at it - and have been all week (and have been planning it for long before this) - and it is going to take away from the time I have to post, so things are slow right now, and I wanted to go ahead and post this lengthy explanation so that you have a better idea of what I mean when I say these things that sound like I'm just making excuses.

Because these beers don't drink themselves. I MEAN...

© C Harris Lynn, 2008