Thursday
7 January 2016

Happy New Year!

Happy new year, everyone! I know a lot of people see it as a bit cliché, but I still like to do a bit of reflection and goal-setting around this time, so here we’ll take a look at the design aspects.

In 2015 I put a really strong focus on learning, especially web design. In transforming my web folio from a single, largely static page into a multi-page site, I’ve set the foundations for plenty of shiny new design elements. From responsive layouts and @media queries and WordPress layouts, to swiping mobile galleries and parallax scrolling, not to mention more and more little jQuery touches like the navigation dropdown and the rollover images in the galleries, I’ve pushed myself as hard as I can. I know I’ll never be a code monkey—there’s still too much frustration and troubleshooting for my liking—but the more of it I can learn, the more beautiful sites I can create.

To combat all the coding and digital and screen work, I also took up brush pen lettering, following a course at Brick+Mortar Creative in Norwood. I love it! I don’t only incorporate it into my designs, but wrapping presents for birthdays and Christmas, and just for fun as I already do with drawing and writing. I’ve needed something more tactile back in my life.

This year, I’m going to take the foundations of those two skills and really develop them. I’ll master brush pen lettering, branching out from the style I already know and push myself to see what other styles I can create. I also want to take a calligraphy course to refine my penmanship there.

In web design, I’ll delve more deeply into parallax scrolling and image galleries, really working hard on what I learned last year to boost my confidence in these new languages. Expect plenty of updates here on (th)inky thoughts and the folio itself. I’ve never had a design blog before, so keeping frequent updates going here will be another fun challenge.

Finally, I’d love to see what I can do with gifsets and aesthetic boards. I’ll go into them in more detail in a later post, but they seem to be an artform almost exclusive to tumblr, where users bring together sets of images to create an aesthetic for anything from a movie or character to feelings or songs. They’ve been something I’ve admired for a while now, and I’d love to see what I could apply them to.

So that’s me for the year, heaps of positivity to come. Bring on 2016!

2 Comments    brush script lettering, things I learnt, web design
Tags: brush script lettering, learning, web design