Blog About Blogging – Part II
(The second in a series of posts on the creating of Waltzing in Perdition.com For the first, click here.)
My brain split in two and I had to concentrate very hard to listen to her and take in the fine points of the article about the camera with the left side while, at the same time, do my best to hang on tight while the right side went on a joyride. In a split second (and I’m not kidding lol) I realized I knew now what I was going to do. And how.
I was going to blog.
I suddenly realized how and why and where and what I was going to do. My only problem was that the board meeting going on inside my head was…well…stuck inside my head. But in a split-second I more or less saw it all design itself and, immediately after my friend left, pulled out a pencil and a clean sheet of paper.
Which always surprises me. Pencil and paper, that is. Because it’s 2010 and no one is really expected to use a pencil and paper anymore. But I do.
Which also surprises me. Because it’s 2010 and everything is electronic and computer and Photoshop and email and Facebook and iPhones (*sign of Cross), but before I put pixel to Internet I still start with a pencil and paper.
So, line-rectangle-square-rounded-edge-divider-divider-divider-those things I draw when I mean dummy text areas-erase/erase/erase (no, that won’t work)-line-line-line-done. And then the thunderstorm sent a bone-shattering bolt of lightening from the open atrium at the top of my laboratory, and I raised my fists to the sky and yelled, “It’s aaaAAAAALLLLLIIIiiiive!”
And then I hated everything I just sketched and decided there was probably a job opening for me somewhere in a shopping mall food court. I decided I was a horrible designer, a hack, a charlatan (ha ha, no one says ‘charlatan’ anymore!), and had no right whatsoever picking up a pencil, let alone firing up Photoshop.
And then I realized how much fun Moody Artist mode was and how much more fun it’d be with a gin & tonic (not that I would) (at 2 in the afternoon), but (yes I would) there was work (and no I didn’t) to be done, so I took another shot at a layout sketch.
And was pretty ticked off.
Because I knew what I was about to put myself through over the course of the next several hours. Which was to try and un-see what I’d seen in the blog design that first rattled my cage and design something that spring-boarded itself off the finest parts of that blog yet didn’t completely bastardize everything within a ten-mile radius. Try as I might, I just couldn’t bring myself to deny the fact that, as design and purpose and communication goes, I was bought and sold the moment I laid eyes on it.
But I’m not new around here and I knew there was no way I was going to not land right back where I started. Because even though there’s only so much one can do with a given amount of screen real estate, I couldn’t escape the tension of settling for anything less than what I’d seen and decided was the Best I’d Ever Seen.
So I gave up, caved in, swallowed my pride, and made quick work of 1024 pixels wide by 800 pixels high.
I was in full I’ll Know It When I See It mode, which is ToddSpeak for “I’m going to be impossible to live with until I get it out of my head and in front of me.” I needed a proper home for what I wanted to write. And not just what I wanted to write, but how. I was working out in my head something that I could be proud of to not only deliver what I wanted to blog about, but make the experience of delivering it something I actually enjoyed. Which is way more complicated than the process right-out-of-the-box actually is. I mean, you can go to any number of blog creating web sites and start Right Now.
That is, unless you have something so customized going on in your head it’s going to take and Act of Congress to wrest it from the recesses of your freak brain.
It was time to find someone who could take what I designed and give it a brain.
And a very big one, at that.
I wish I had a way to open up every folder within a folder within a layer within a mask within a channel…and show you all that I decided Had To Be Done. But the best I can do is this meager screen shot of the actual source file of the WiP blog in its native format. See that Layers palette on the left? I actually counted the individual layers in the original design. Now, mind you, though a great many of them are merged in the final form, the number is a little lower than the actual…but, then again, not really. Because everything is created in—and remains in—layers so that I can go back at anytime and decide I hate everything.
To the tune of (brace yourselves)
357 different layers.
And now you understand why I just don’t understand why people call me a perfectionist.
In the next post, I’ll tell you what a nightmare it was finding a coder who understood that when I say Pixel-Perfect, what I’m really saying is “The straight jacket isn’t for my safety…it’s for yours.”
Yes, I still don’t get WHY people call you a perfectionist.