Staci\'s a quirky bird

Another installment of our WTF series to help you understand wtf all this web jargon is all about.

Gravatar is a company that has coined the phrase of the same name. Gravatar means a Globally recognized avatar. You’ll notice in our comments that if a person posts it shows a geometric picture to represent you. Let me explain how to personalize this for use on this and any blog on the web using gravatars (that would be most of them).

Step 1: go to www.gravatar.com

Step 2: If you have a wordpress log in, log in right there on the home page. If you don’t and you want one (you don’t have to have a blog, you can just get an account), go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for one (just opt out of the blog). If you don’t want a wordpress account, just click the ‘get a gravatar’ button and follow the steps.

Step 3: once you have an account, you can update it with your photo and profile info.

See how easy that was? Test it out here in our comments, and be sure to link us back to your own website if you have one.

So this morning as I’m sipping my coffee, reading over my favorite blogs, I check in on a site that I love that’s full of designer portfolios. Most of them are web designers. So many are enviable, they’re at the front of the trends…really they’re setting the trends. It’s inspirational and, as you can imagine – brings a few tinges of inadequacy. Reminds of this funny shirt I saw, but of course didn’t bookmark. It basically says the point of being a graphic artist is to make all the other graphic artists jealous. We must have gigantic egos.

Anyway, as I’m perusing (drooling over) these portfolio sites, I start to realize a few things.

Most weren’t very user friendly

There’s a big trend in design to have a one page portfolio. I really don’t get this, I want people to be able really get to know us and our work through our website, and how could I do that if you only had one page of information to look through?

The ones that did have multiple pages, the navigation was hidden somewhere in the design…either in a font that’s way too small, way up in the top right corner of the page or worked into the design in a way that I didn’t really know I could or was supposed to click if I did happen to see it.

Almost none were search engine friendly

There was minimal text on the pages, and with only having a one page site, google doesn’t like that so much. The more content you have, the more there is to log. Obviously, within reason – and a blog does help this – but just having one page with maybe 500 words total for your entire site is search engine suicide.

Style and function are two different things

I truly believe that you can have both, but function has to win if there’s a time when you have to choose. Who cares if your site looks like an amazing piece of art if A) nobody can find it and B) if they do happen to stumble on it, they have no idea where the heck they’re supposed to go? It’s a mystery to me.

At the end of the day…

It’s really an interesting emotion to look at something and envy the look, but then try to use it, or look at it like google would and realize there’s a major miss. All style, no substance. Hopefully we’ve married the two with quirky bird, because that was definitely the idea.

So I’ve been slammed all summer with work. Taking too much on as usual. All of June/July was spent moving everyone off our server. All of August was spent redesigning our site. Now, we’re into our busy season – the OMG-I-have-to-be-live-by-xmas season. So, the next few months around here are going to be bananas to say the least. And now that I’m finished complaining, here are the goods.

I’ve posted a few new pieces of art in the doodles on the right, here they are in full size:

We were driving home and I saw this utility pipe cap sticking out of the ground. It was bright yellow and had big twist handles on the front and I immediately loved it. Came home and sketched it out.

This one I did a while ago while watching Doc Hollywood (don’t laugh). As he’s walking down main street, he asks someone how they are and they said, Well I couldn’t be happier if I was twins. I spent the rest of the movie drawing.

Inspiration is the hardest part of art I’ve found. The idea has to come from somewhere, the rest is just practice. Another really difficult thing – drawing mirror images. Notice how light my pencil marks are, I’m totally gunshy to get in there and commit to the design for fear I’ll want to change something. Graphics are so much easier, I don’t ever really have to commit to anything. Does that make me an art-commitment-aphob? I’m working on that.

I have more to share that I made, but it’ll have to wait. They’re gifts and the recipients might be watching! Must.keep.on.dl. This is very hard for me you understand.

Enjoy your holiday weekend (if you’re in the US), meet you back here next week for the post-holiday hangover once again.