Learning Log: Jun 2017
Subject-matter notes I updated this month: logo design, Illustrator, accessibility
Week of May 28 (second half)
- Recently I was reading You Are a Badass, but decided I wasn't really in a self help-y mood (partially the state of affairs makes it harder to care about that sort of thing) and abandoned it. I remember one point the author made though, this week: that the stories we tell ourselves have an impact on how our lives actually pan out. I'm realizing I've told myself "I'm not very good at logos", and while that might have and might still be true, things might have played out a little differently if I had really dug into identity design. Never too late to try!
- In this vein, I watch another (see May write-up) video about logo design, this time about the use of grids to structure logos.
- In CSS specs, I finish reading about paged media and start colors and backgrounds.
- Picking back up on the Yeoman generator I'm building to scaffold web projects. I read the create-your-own-generator docs, write a couple command line prompts for the generator, and add some basic project files. The built files are the same for each project "type", so next I'll work on differentiating Jekyll, Wordpress, and HTML/other projects.
Week of June 4
- I decide that the adjustments I'm making to my website don't feel genuine to me, so I smoosh together some of the old stuff and some of the new stuff and call it a day. And then ask a friend to yell at me if I try to make changes other than bug fixes and a11y improvements before the end of summer.
- CSS spec readings: colors and backgrounds, fonts
- Apparently
cursiveandfantasyare appropriate values for the generic family names at the end of a font stack!cursivesounds like it would end up with a pretty ok default font from the user agent (browser, etc), but not so sure howfantasywould play out because that could be so many different decorative font families. Note to self: find out what the different UAs use for these fallbacks!
- Apparently
- I bounce out of the CSS 2.2 specs to read about flexbox for some test-reviewing tasks.
- Learning about pixel art. I'm introduced to this neat free pixel art editor, which has some nice tools for pixel art that Adobe software doesn't have.
- Neat stuff about photo colorization
Week of June 11
- CSS spec readings: fonts, text, tables
- You can access system fonts for various use cases from the
fontproperty; see details. That brings over not just font family, but also size, weight, etc. That kind of takes "use system fonts" to its logical extreme.
- You can access system fonts for various use cases from the
- Making improvements for users of screen magnifiers seems like it would help UX all-around.
- I spend an hour or two watching a video tutorial on pixel art
- Good reads: Black teachers matter, The Road to Burnout is Paved With Context Switching
Weeks of June 18, 25
- These past couple weeks have been a bit all over the place, with sad thing and busy things (picked up some moonlighting work). I'm hoping to reboot my morning "creative habit" in July because it has pretty much fallen by the wayside.
- CSS specs: tables
- Good reads: Forests, Just Like the Ones Mother Nature Used to Make, Accessibility according to actual people with disabilities, creativity and rest, The 80/20 rule
- Thanks to The botanists’ last stand: The daring work of saving the last samples of dying species I, of course, now want to be a botanist.