December 21, 2003
Some knit, I design
by Liza Sabater
I love to play with fonts, backgrounds, images. Since discovering CSS, I can't stay put, playing around with all the nifty tricks I get from sites like css/edge, /* Position Is Everything */ or A List Apart.
Just as some women knit, I just sit down and do some graphic or web design. It relaxes me. It moves me webward and gets me out of the funk that is often associated with blogging but that, in all honesty, is just 'word' fatigue. Firing up Photoshop or giving a whirl to the CSS validator is all I need to come back here, jumping with joy.
I've always been a visual writer. I guess it is due to my dyslexia --I see scenes that become words and then ideas. But writing is sometimes not as satisfying as, for example, banging a logo or creating a new layout. Call me frootie but, really, words always end up giving me fatigue. There are things that I want to express that is just easier to do with visuals.
Take Xmas: I love the season, I love the magic involved with it. It's a time to glitter in the middle of the cold, darkness and gloom of winter. Hence the new logo. Now that I made it, I can articulate the 'vision' in words. End of writer's block.
Another example is the site I finished about a week or so ago for N Y C H E A. This is my donation to the association. Their old website just looked 1995 --lots of blinking texts and gratuituous animated GIFs. Visually, it said nothing about the people that make up the organization. And nowhere did you get a sense that this was a NYC group of homeschoolers. So this is what I created:
I am a member of NYCHEAs council and this design "came to me" after a meeting. We had discussed at lenght how homeschooling is a misnomer in a city like NY, where almost all of the learning activities involve the use of a subway map. Subways are how homeschoolers connect --they are the original WWWeb. You can get anything from any place in the world here in NYC. All you need is a MetroCard. The new design just screams "New YOWK".
I have a hard time looking at myself as an artist or a visually creative person. I always get hired to write but somehow, somewhere, I end up creating the art, layouts or even re-branding for the job. Why? Becuase it is how I cope with word fatigue. I 'finagle' with images, fonts and layouts until I find the proper support for my words. Then it's just rock 'n roll.
Mark walked by and saw my 'finagling' with Photoshop. I felt 'caught in the act'; playing instead of working.
'Ooh! Google', he said.
'What?'
'Just like Google. A seasonal logo. Cool.'
'Oh.'
And with that, I finagled some more.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Design
Permalink |
Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0) | Technorati Cosmos
Trackbacks
Trackback for this post:http://www.culturekitchen.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/315
The following blogs make reference to this post :
