A while ago I offered Just Miss a custom wordpress theme as a birthday present. I wasn’t sure whether she’d take me up on it, but in one of my afternoon design-y moments I designed and tweaked (and tweaked and tweaked) a possible theme and sent it her way. She might like it, she might hate it, she might not want to use it. Such is the way of presents, I think.

But I have to say that when someone you’ve created something for LOVES it, it is pretty much in my top 5 awesome feelings ever.

So I developed the theme (not without some serious frustration at DTR) and once it was all bug free she launched a fancy new site (justonemiss.com), with a fancy new theme!

Perhaps it’s just me, but I get such a kick out of seeing my designs in use. Seeing her blog rock my design all sweet like. Watching the comments and tweets roll in as she got more and more complements about it. Warm Fuzzies all round, I think.

There is a flickr photo pool that starts with ‘Design Is’. They have wallpapers that say things like ‘Design is Thinking Made Visual‘ or ‘Design is Created Reality‘ but really?

Design is AWESOME.

[Edit: After Kyla's super kind comments, I work for Sinter Design and Development, and if you'd like a wordpress theme, or a website or whatever you can reach me there, or you can find me on Etsy. :)]

In the middle of town there is this small little stall on a street corner that does THE BEST PANCAKES EVER. They are so fantastic, that The Square made two visits in as many days. Oh, I wish I worked in town again, there would be much pancake eating.

It’s hard to say what makes them fantastic, really. It could be that you can choose what goes inside the pancake (yes they come with FILLINGS!). I voted cheese the last two times, but The Third Quarter was keen on the cinnamon syrup one. It could be that the dough is left to rise a bit before being made into a pancake (which means it’s a bit more puffy than those ones you make at home). It could be that it’s made by two asian guys in paper sailor hats, or that it’s so typically asian it’s almost quaint. It could be that you can get a giant pancake, easily as filling as a meal, for $2.50.

And it’s not just us that thinks this little pancake stall is fantastic. When we were driving past on Friday Night The Fourth Quarter said they were closed, and then, “Oh wait, it’s just that THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE OUTSIDE I COULDN’T SEE THE LIGHTS.”

I think it really is a testament to it’s awesomeness that a bunch of people are willing to stand out in the cold on the street to wait for fancy pancakes to be made for them. You get them in a brown paper bag, fresh off the grill. They are usually too hot to eat straight away, I managed to burn my tongue trying to eat the first one, but my god is it worth it. Delicious goodness indeed!

Oh Korean Pancake, you are brilliant. Two Thumbs Up!

I usually send all my packages wrapped in brown paper, if I can. I like smell, and the texture. And it always looks super cute. :) I <3 sending mail, and I don't really do it often enough (I once was part of a Marvellous Mail community, where people would send packages. But I got a bit snobbish, and only wanted to SEND them).

Anyway, I sent out a bunch this week, and I think the best part was sending out the package with Mail ‘Bots all over it:

Totally. Awesome. Much better than mail without Mail ‘Bots :)

A while ago I stopped by to see a friend, and her little one was colouring with crayons. We joked around and discussed how things were when WE were kids, and she mentioned watching a Seasme Street about how crayons are made.

The great thing about the internet is that you can still find that stuff from years and years ago, and so I searched youTube and tada:

As I watched it, I thought about how labour intensive it was. While yes, alot of it was still done by machinery, it’s not likely that that guy is still manually scrapping off the excess wax. I was right, you know. I found another segment, not by Seasme Street:

More machines, less people. I was relieved to see that they still use people for some of it. Just not as much anymore.

Still, I guess times change? It was a cute trip back, no matter how briefly it lasted. :)

These were taken when we were in New Plymouth a while back. It’s been so dismal in Auckland the last little while. Rain and wind . . . and often it’s so dark by the time that I get home that it’s not me taking Quinn for daily walks anymore. :(

I’m glad we still have all these photos. It was a great weekend away, the walks were new and different and quite dramatic, actually (check out the surf, and the black sand, and the driftwood scattered over the beach). We don’t have walks like this in Auckland.

I’m holding out till the weekend, we’ll have our walks then, I think.

- George Santayana.

I don’t do alot of design work in my current role, which is understandable. I wasn’t hired as a designer, and I have zero design training (my degree was all about the technical implementation side, and about usability) so that’s kind of understandable.

But I like web design. Creating cute websites, or wordpress themes or whatever. And while I’m not working on any big projects I put aside a little time each day to make something cute. Refine a logo, or a create theme overview, or some colour swatches or something. Just little things to refine my eye, bolster my design skills. And a friend of mine suggested that I DO something with these little pieces of practice.

So, I started an etsy store (rargBanners.etsy.com). It’s kind of ordinary, actually. I sell one-off premade banner packages, which is actually an okay format for my little doodles and whatever. The problem is, now that I have a store, I kinda hoped that I’d manage to actually sell something.

It appears that I’ve entered into an already saturated market. It doesn’t matter that my designs are prettier that alot of whats out there (though, I’m a little biased. I also recognise that there are some that kick my behind quite nicely), it appears that I’m not going to sell anything via the etsy search engine unless some one stumbles over it head first.

It also appears, that if I’d like to sell something I need to pimp it, and well. I’m kinda adverse to pimping something that started off as a daily design exercise, you know? My main goal wasn’t really to sell anything. Unfortunately etsy has (very small but still existent) listing prices so I’d at least like to make that cost back.

Anyway, I figured pimping could almost be excused if I used it as a critiquing exercise. So, here are a couple of the banners I’ve created. Let me know what you think? What you like, what you don’t like? What seems ridiculous, what’s really cute, what I should and shouldn’t have done?

These ones are all animal themed. I thought they were kind of cute.

Anyway, let me know what you think?

- XKCD Comic, Grownups.

Earlier this week The Second Quarter returned from Thailand (where I’m sure he had a fabulous time with the lady-men and ping pong balls), and so delighted was The Square (and posse) with his return, we decorated his room for him.

After a while of doing this:

We got this:

In short, it was brilliant. His room is quite big, and we filled it with over 500 coloured balloons, pink sequined streamers, toilet paper, a pink “Welcome Home” sign (with added lady-men illustrations), one blown up condom, and a cpr training doll with a peacock feather mask. It was so full that the balloons came up past our knees. PAST. OUR. KNEES. There was many, many balloons.

It took a whole afternoon, and eight adults. There was much balloon madness to be had:

I couldn’t wait for The Second Quarter to come home, but alas, I was busy and couldn’t be around when he got back to see his reaction. Apparently he was in shock and it took a good few seconds for comprehension to dawn on him. He said that it reminded him of the XKCD Comic, Grownups (which is what it reminded me of, too. But Balloons instead of Playpen Balls. It was ridiculous amounts of fun, really, it was.

I especially love the XKCD quote (in the title) now, because as adults we ARE in a position where we able to do such silly things as fill a room with happy rubbery goodness. We are in a position where we are able to do something just because it’d be hilarious, and cause moments of joy (and there was much joy to be had walking with balloons floating about your knees). I’m glad I’m friends with such crazy, crazy people, who are totally willing to fill a room with 500+ balloons. So much Square <3! :)

I went down to the mall yesterday, and low and behold there are signs where previously, there were none.

After calming down some (I got myself worked up around a sexism/discrimination theory) I guessed street art. Most of you guessed (or were amused by) misplaced toilet signage. One of you even had a weird muslim seperatist theory. In the end we were all wrong. It’s actually:

Parking for seniors. Not that you’d know based on the signage. I don’t think that symbol in anyway says “Seniors”. Alas, it’s just another example of the local council being ridiculous. Perhaps they thought it would be politically incorrect to age the symbol people to actually signify age.

Just quietly, I still prefer the misplaced toilet meaning. Hah! :)

Autumn is most definitely here. There is a street Quinn and I walk up to get to the local park that has completely exploded in colour. All the trees have either turned super bright yellow, or are a fantastic mix of red and oranges:

It’s super cold at the moment (even when the sky is super blue) and going outside means multiple layers, but I love ironic the colour change – all the trees almost look like they are on fire. It’s brilliant, really.

I’ve been working on a custom wordpress theme as part of a much belated birthday present, and one of the requests was to have the fancy font that I’d used for all the headers to be used dynamically for the post titles. Usually all the fancy titles and stuff that you see on sites are actually static images, as you can’t rely on the users machine to have the fancy font installed. So, generally, you’re limited to maybe a handful of fonts. I wasn’t so keen on making an image everytime the author wanted to make a post so I did some hunting around.

I came across A List Apart’s DTR Article by Stewart Rosenberger. You upload your fancy font to the server and it uses a small php script to make a temporary image which is used instead of the text. I also found an adapted version called P+C DTR, which used PHP and CSS to do the same thing.

Win:

Fail:

But, there were a few problems. The P+C DTR files had been removed, and I wanted a little more functionality than what the ALA’s DTR offered. So I did what any normal person and scoured the internet to find a decent copy of the files. What I found was example 1.6.1. for P+C DTR. You can find a zipped version here.

Unzip the file, and upload the whole thing to your web server, and test the example page. If you don’t get the pretty pictures check with your host, you’ll need a decent version of PHP (I’m sure this script is old school, so it should work okay with anything 3.0 and up. I haven’t tested it, so don’t quote me. It works fine with 5.0). You will also need the GD Library with PHP support installed on your server. If you don’t know what that means, talk to your Host and get them to figure out it for you.

Once the example pretty pictures are up and running, follow the README instructions and upload your font file to the dtr folder, alter the heading.css as you see fit, and add the php calls to the top and bottom and link the style sheet. It really is as easy as it sounds.

The problem I had was integrating it with Wordpress. Three days of trying various combinations and banging my head against the wall. It point blank refused to work and by the end of it I was ready the gouge out my own eye, so painful was this DTR problem. What worked in the very pretty example did NOT work when I tried to do the same within the Wordpress templates.

In the end I asked the advice of the brilliant Jennifer from InkSplash Designs who had successfully used DTR on Shamelessly Sassy and KDaly Photography and she said she’d had the same frustrating issues I had! But she did have some very clever tricks to get it working. Here’s what to do:

1. Install the /dtr folder in the root directory. So it should be in the same directory as the /wp-admin, /wp-content, /wp-includes folders, etc. (I’m fairly sure this is the source of all those frustrating issues! I’d installed it in the template folder)

2. In the theme files, put this:

In header.php, at the very very top, before the doctype: <**? php include 'dtr/dtr.php'; ?>

And for the stylesheet (I put this before the wp_head function): <**link href="/dtr/headings.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Then at the bottom of footer.php, after the html tag: <**?php ob_end_flush(); ?>

(You’ll need to remove the **’s).

Anyway, now it works like it’s meant to! Hurrah – I’m so glad. I figured I’d post about it here, so that no one else has to scour the internet and come up empty handed!