Let me first start by saying, I am not a designer by trade, but I do enjoy reading about it and trying to understand it better. In general I know what looks good. Getting my own work to look good is the tougher part. I have 3 rules I follow to get the job done and it’s something I learned from a designer friend of mine.

It’s referred to the 3 C’s of design: Consistency, Conservation (Clutter-busting) and Contrast

The one I use the most every day is “consistency”. You can face design pretty darn well by just making sure your layout is consistent.

This basically means that make sure you use 1 base font on the design and making sure that the spaces above, below and on the sides of elements and text are always the same. (I find that multiples of that number also works well when you need larger spaces)

Because this is an interest field of mine I was very excited when the opportunity came along to recode the existing Lexus South Africa website.

The site’s been around for a while and under the hands of a few different agencies before it landed on my desk. As a result, there was a ton of inconsistencies all over the place like text that didn’t line up with headlines, different fonts in the same sub navigation, different spacing sizes on different internal pages and then there was the old images that was re-saved so many times that they started to look crusty.

Looking back, I didn’t change anything too noticeable. I just made sure all the spaces are consistent, replaced all the crusty layout images with new and fresh ones and made sure that the font was consistent throughout the site.

I know this might be very up in the air, so I decided to provide you with some examples below:

“Alberto Cerriteño is a Mexican illustrator & designer who has lived in America; Portland for nearly four years now. Strongly inspired by urban vinyl toys, alternative cartoons, and the pop surrealism movement, Alberto Cerriteño has developed his own very personal technique and style, having always present a delicate hints of traditional Mexican artistic influences in his management of rich textures and decorative patterns. These contrast strikingly with the blending of desaturated colors and ink, sometimes featuring a vintage coffee finish. Alberto Cerriteño illustrations have been recognized by progressive art institutions such as Juxtapoz, Create, Drawn!, The Little Chimp Society, Computer Arts, Communication Arts and IDN among others. He has also been invited to participate in collaborative art projects all around the world and diverse solo and groupal gallery shows.”

http://albertocerriteno.com

Were you directed here from Google or simply passing by to check out an old article you read previously only to find that it isn’t here anymore? Don’t worry you’re not imagining things, they were here and are gone now. Here is why:

Al my sites (12 in total) was hosted by a local hosting company who was basically reselling American hosting at affordable prices. That hosting solution went well for longer than 2 years, but then the server got hacked. This is also a pretty normal thing to happen. I’ve seen it before and I’m sure I will see it again.

The problem came in when the American hosting company didn’t do backups like they were supposed to and to make a long story short lost 3 months of my data across all my sites.

I moved my sites over to Media Temple and so far it’s running really well, the service is great and they have ridiculous amounts of help files in their online knowledge base.

I also didn’t have any backups of the missing posts, so I guess they are gone. The good news is that I’m not planning to stop writing on the blog, so I’m sure that those articles will soon be a distant memory, dwarfed by the awesome new articles on blog.codeninja.co.za

OK, so I’m in the process of recoding the Win This! website. This time around I did everything on the site, The design, the HTML/CSS/JavaScript and I’m now busy doing the PHP integration from the back-end I built for the initial launch.

So here are some teaser images for what you can expect from the new site:

Check back soon to see the final product.

I thought of this while I was doing the breakfast thing and thought I’ll share. So take this for what it is..

1. Margarine and Ice-cream both come in those plastic containers. The type that’s tough to crack open on the 1st try but tend to open by themselves once opened, kind of like a snobbish person.

2. Both margarine and ice-cream have to be held in a cold place, but it’s not the best idea to put margarine in the deep freezer (it will destroy your sandwiches), but then again you also don’t want to ice-cream in the refrigerator, unless you want to use it for milkshake.

3. That brings me to my next comparison. Both margarine and ice-cream have a useful purpose in melted form, ice-cream turns into milkshake and margarine turns into something you can fry your eggs and other assorted items in.

4. Both margarine and ice-cream come in a low fat option.

5. Ice-cream acts as a great social lubricant, everybody loves it and it will bring people together in seconds. Margarine just acts as a great lubricant, which in turn can also be seen as a way to bring people together I guess..

6. They are both found in the kitchen, unless of course you use the margarine for the above mentioned purpose, in which case it’s probably a good idea to put it back in the fridge afterwards. If you are going to tell your housemates about where it’s been is completely up to you.

Can you think of more similarities? I would love to hear it!