I want to thank everyone who submitted their redesigns! I’m excited that about half of the links below came from submissions while the other half I found while surfing. Not every site here is a complete redesign; some sites updated their banners enough to give their site a fresh look and I wanted to include them here. I always learn something new when I look at new sites. This month I noticed a few blogging platforms I’m unfamiliar with: MoonFruit, Weebly, and Overblog. And, I also learned that Shopify provides a built-in blog for your shop. That’s pretty cool! Note to self: must learn about Shopify. Anyhow, thanks again for your submissions. I totally enjoyed checking out your new designs.
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inside my new home —
crystallized. will share photos after move-in!
My big life event this week was packing for my move. I’ll be really happy to have everything settled so that I can get back to my normal life. I learned recently that I’m going to have to get a bear-proof garbage can! I didn’t realize that my new hood is the home of bears, cougars, and wildcats! My goodness. The brochure tells me to never make eye contact with a bear and back away slowly. On the other hand, look a cougar directly in the eye and wave your arms like a nut (and maybe they’ll back away). I hope that I don’t get my signals mixed up!
Anyhow, enough of about my life. Here are some links loved: an awesome Maria Popova interview, sweet Bea, cute pug iphone case, mineral magnets, online mags, and much much more!
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February 14, 2013
in Fonts
Today’s fashion is the bold graphic Rodrizo dress by Mary Katrantzou and the font is Gunn from MyFonts. A many-faceted graphic deserves a many-facted font, which Gunn certainly is. Love it — it feeds my geo obsession of late. Now, if you’re looking for a free font with a similar look and feel, check out Sullivan over at the Lost Type Co-op.
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I love coincidences. Today’s post is about adding lines or “section dividers” to your blog using CSS. The image above is a random photo I took with my iPhone recently. The synchronicity comes in when I look back at my previous CSS box outlines/borders post and see that the cover photo was also of roses — same topic, similar photo — isn’t that neat-o?!! Anyway, this post is a response to Monica’s question about how she could create section dividers for her blog…
Every element in an HTML page is inside of an invisible box — in other words, every paragraph, every image, every header, every footer, and every blog post is inside its own little box! We can make the edges of these boxes visible by using the CSS BORDER property.
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Maybe I’m a little premature to think about decorating my house before my home loan has been finalized, but I’m already thinking about tiny embellishments for my future home office. I’ve had succulents and air plants on the brain for the last few days and I’ve found some cute hand-dipped pods on Bird and Feather. The pods, in turn, reminded me of the Oliver Jeffers “hand-dipped” painting I saw on SFGirlbyBay. Anyhow, I thought the dipped look would be fitting for some of the photos I took on the road back from Oregon. There’s a lot of empty space in these shots and I felt a semi-paint-covered look would liven them up a bit. I was lucky to find some super wide brush impressions over at Spoon Graphics. The brushes are awesome and they’re free — thanks, Spoon Graphics!
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Nail polish names are fun — Opi’s pastel green is Read My Palm and a darker green is Jade is the New Black, and Essie’s hot pink is Fiesta. Web browsers have some inspired names for colors, too. Sure, the old standbys are there — red, blue, green, grey, and black — but web browsers actually have a built-in vocabulary of more than 140 named colors. There’s MintCream, Honeydew, MistyRose, PeachPuff and BlanchedAlmond. And each one can be used instead of the hex code in your CSS. For example, you can use Tomato in your CSS instead of the hex value #FF6342. Or SeaGreen instead of #2E8B57.
The real plus of color names is that they’re really easy to remember and use on the fly. I don’t use named colors in every project, but when I do, I always appreciate the clever, descriptive color names. Even though there are only 140+ named colors, it’s still possible to come up with some pleasing color palettes. You can see my favorites below. I’ve included the hex color values for each named color, as the hex codes are useful when you want to use a named color in Photoshop…
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As I was sorting through my magazines, preparing for my future, I came across my first issue of The Gentlewoman, which I bought after reading about it on Miss Moss. It’s issue No. 6, Autumn and Winter 2012, with Angela Lansbury on the cover. The uncluttered simplicity of the cover is beautiful, and, as a font lover, I couldn’t help but cheer to see my fave font, Futura Medium, used on the pink cover, and throughout the mag for titles. There are lots of black and white photos on matte paper and a few glossy pages interspersed throughout. Flipping through the pages is a tactile pleasure. I get the feeling that the magazine is a well-crafterd labor of love — just plain luscious. The article on Angela Lansbury was fun, too. I’ve always thought of her as the Jessica Fletcher character she played in Murder, She Wrote, so I was surprised to see that she was quite a hottie back in the day. And now, at 86, she is truly gorgeous.
A couple of years ago I saw the Adele issue at The Green Apple, but I passed on it. That’s a missed opportunity that I regret. I won’t be missing any more issues.
Autumn/Winter 2012 Details
Number of Pages: 275
Ad Pages: 43
Price: $14.99 USD
Frequency: Biannual
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