Designery afternoon.

Managed to get quite a few design pieces for church out today. *satisfied*

Here’s a little preview of the June update:

In other news, my dearest Muffin, you are SOOOOOOOOOOO lazy. I buy you a nice new shiny green ball and you go in, totter around for several seconds then CURL UP TO SLEEP! Harrump. Also, you are getting fat. Do not think I haven’t realized that your little penthouse is started to slant downwards and one day its really going to fall off the main body of your cage.

In other, other news… I never seem to come back from Ikea without new baking equipment. Yay for spanky new containers.

Is ‘Who Am I’ even a valid question to ask?

Been having too many opportunities for self-reflection lately. It’s something I steer away from because when you look at yourself, you’re basically doing a cross-sectional analysis of who you are in contrast with other people, regardless of whether it’s a positive or negative self-evaluation. Funny thing is I’m not doing much of it, rather it’s the words that people around me have been using to describe who I appear to be.

The last time I spoke to Tim about all I felt was wrong with me, he kept reminding me not to look at myself, but to turn my eyes away and be Christ-conscious rather than self-conscious.

Pride is something hard to fall from, so I want to avoid even taking that ladder.

Strong. I am undeserving of that description, I can only say that the Lord is my strength. I stand only because He is holding me up.

—

In other news I have begun my SID, which is an acronym Psy has started using to term my ’self-indulgent designing’, aka, a much needed break and rebellion from all the designing I’ve been doing for other people according to other people’s needs. Now I’m doing things I want to design, for the continued health of my design life before I really give up the ghost from sheer burn-out. (Ironic eh. In order to combat designing too much, I need to design even more.) I’m working on a series of typography experiments now, tentatively called ‘My Life in Type’. Will set up another separately blog soon to chronicle my journey with that, and also to post APAD [A Picture a Day], which I should start doing now that D90 has joined the family of Lizzy’s techfriends.

I’ll probably find something cheesy to name it sooner or later, like how my past two phones were called Sexy and Gorgeous… well, my MacBook’s actually Beloved (as those of you who’ve bluetoothed me know), but it’s now better known as Greenie, because it’s green (and beautiful). My iPod touch which has yet to find it’s way back into my hands was just Poddy. I like literal, descriptive names, so I can remember them. (Like how I christened Shannon’s camera ‘Cranky’ and it seems to have stuck. STUCK. HAHA. Okay no pun was intended, really, I should stop laughing at my own jokes.)

Time to head to school now.

It’s been another busy week despite it being summer break. I hate to call it a penchant for saikang, but to put it in a nicer way, I enjoy a job well done. Schedule’s pretty packed again for the day (as it was yesterday: make IC, head to Sunshine to print Outsight stuff, meet Huiling for lunch, back to Sunshine to collect Outsight stuff, off to Millenia for Comma meeting. And the day before, school to collect the stuff from Prof, return my room keys, meet WK and friend for Coke campaign discussion…). Will be heading to school now to put up Outsight, print stuff, then CG tonight at Jo’s.

Busy busy, and happily SIDing. It truly is self-indulgence. But I should really be planning the London itinerary for my family because Sis has unceremoniously left the job to me.

Sometimes I feel like I’m already a working professional, though I suppose when that time comes it’ll be worse. I don’t say that because I’m producing professional quality work, I just say that because I always seem to have work, and it’ll actually be a rather nice change to go away for a week without Greenie and without having to open Photoshop or Illustrator or anything.

Though as WK says, I’ll probably find design inspiration regardless of where I go, and of course I’ll not miss any chances to should they avail themselves to me in London. Maybe I should go see if there’s some exhibition worth attending.

Kenn said I can’t stop designing, because it’s in my blood (in response to my MSN nick yesterday which said I was tired of designing for other people).

I would like to refute the statement but am finding it a little bit difficult to. I don’t know how I got caught up doing so much of it in the past 2 to 3 years that I can no longer imagine a life where I would not need or want to design.

O well.

Time to go to school.

So much for…

Taking a design break. Lol.

Wanted to take these 3 months as a sabbatical to design my own stuff. But on reflection these are the activities I already have on my plate for the hols:

• Comma
• Nanyang Chronicle
• WKWFOC’09
• And just agreed to join WK’s group for the ADdiction Coke Campaign…

Also have jumped on the Moleskine bandwagon thanks to Weiliang.

Yes, I probably don’t need such an expensive notebook, but I just liked the idea of using something that was deliberately created to serve such a creative function. The paper quality’s good anyhow. I do not claim to be an artist. I am barely a designer. But I guess I never stopped loving notebooks. (Was almost tempted to buy some at Paperchase again today, as usual…)

I spend way too much time at bookshops. Went to Tampines1 yesterday, it was dangerously filled with humans (the type if there’s a fire people will probably mostly die from the ensuing stampede) and was also disappointingly boring. Jason noted that I spent the most time in the paper shop (Urban Write or something, a Popular spinoff but with loads of pretty notebooks and paper things that Liz has a serious weakness for).

Spent most of my go-out time in Kino today as well. Came home with my new Moleskine notebooks (the 3 for $23/- type), IdN magazine which seems to have gotten more expensive, and Vol. 3 and 4 of Fables.

Went there after lunching with Mom and Sis at SPRUCE. It’s this awesome new food place that was featured in one of the recent issues of 8Days. Somewhat like PS Cafe with less impressive dessert and drink selection but the food was really good. The Spruce Burger is quite awesome and the freshly baked bread was the type that totally melts in your mouth. The grilled squid salad was a plate chock full of rockets which by the way, is the best plant to ever happen to salad-kind. And the place itself looks so quaint and amazing. I really wish I brought a camera. It’s totally picturesque and the type of cafe/bar/restaurant I would like to open some day.

Pitched to Mom the idea of me going to baking school and she investing money to open such a pad and she said go for it. Lol. We’ve discussed this quite a few times in passing. All I need to do now is really make up my mind and go take some proper culinary lessons. Hmmm….

Getting my D90 tomorrow with WL. Shall start thinking of what to christen that new baby…

By the way for those who don’t know yet, I’ve lost my iPod touch. And yes I am very devastated.

Also have not gone to school to see if my matric card is in Nanyang Audi.

And have also realized that I lost my IC after going to the bank at SMU a few weeks ago. *big sigh*

Shall go pack now. And hope my IC turns up.

And pray that poddy comes back to me too……….

Of blessings and other things.

A few people have told me how ‘lucky’ Jason is to have me.

While this is true (ahem ahem), I too know how blessed I am to have him.

I made some of my yummy banana bread tonight. But in cupcake form. Jason took some really decent pictures of it. (Mom was home = camera was home + boyfriend who knows how to handle a camera better than me = not bad shots of cupcakes!)

But I can’t transfer it over because I left the card-reader in hall.

So you shall have to wait to see the yummies AND BOY ARE THEY YUMMY.

Banana muffins, mascarpone frosting, and dusted with cinnamon sugar. So so good.

In case you’re wondering why my baked goods haven’t been cameo-ing on this blog… It is because 1) my baking hours have drastically been reduced in recent months 2) sucky kitchen lighting plus sucky camera phone = let’s not even try.

More tomorrow.

So much for doing work today. HAAAAAAA.

All I finished was the WKWSCI Shirt Launch poster.

Plugging it at http://wkwsci.wordpress.com.

So true!

Sis just sent me this…

It is so hilariously funny and true.

I CAN'T SEND MY EMAIL!!

Just a couple of weeks ago I wanted to kill Erastus (the now retired Compaq I was using) because it just refused to let me open or send anything. I took an entire hour to convince yousendit.com to accept my .psd file. Lol. -_-

FINALLY !

OMGOSH RWRWEWTERTFSDGDHD!

I know its really pink. Like really, really pink. But its going to stay by virtue of HOW LONG I took to figure out the CSS and edit everything accordingly!!!!

Tediously went through the CSS because I wasn’t familiar with practically all the semantics. Slowly edited one by one and created my images as I went along the code and finally, after 39234 hours which you all know to be a gross exaggeration… SUCCESS!!! 

Header was created in Illustrator, playing around with it again… Shall want to practice more vectoring.. Hm. I know the header’s based on pretty commonly seen concepts. But I just wanted to try making them myself… just for the satisfaction. I’m getting more and more reluctant to blatantly do a design completely based on free vectors/brushes because these are things I want to create myself! Still learning… still learning..  

 

Anyway, cycling with Rene today was funny. Every excursion with Rene always brings me much reason to laugh at really silly things. But my legs pretty much jellied after that. 

Am (almost) torn between vectoring and baking tomorrow! 

But baking wins. 

So time to try out some green tea biscuits and oreo cheesecake cups!

Da da da dummm!

Okay. Finished the header. It’s as pink, girly and cheery as I wanted it to be. 

But shall have to deal with the rest of the layout too, so more tonight – perhaps.

This has been such a slow nua week. 

Going to meet Rene to cycle and have dinner. That girl needs to do some sort of restaurant review for her HTM assignment and there’s a whole bunch of anal questions to answer. Lol.

Here’s a teensy preview while we’re at it.

I did warn you about the pink, fluffy goodness of it all… No I don’t want to question what I’m turning into. Green is still my favourite colour. *crosses fingers* It’s just that I’ve been highly fascinated by pink.. lately. 

Okay I’m going to be late… but knowingly, so will Rene. Laters..

Too cute.

So today I finally overcame my fear of Illustrator (drove me crazy figuring the program out for ages) and used it to draw. Was actually trying to come up with a new design for this blog, now that I’ve sort of figured out the confuddlings that is unadulterated CSS as offered by WordPress (yes I paid USD$15 for the upgrade so I darn well have to figure out how to zhng my blog properly). 

As Craig Cook puts it in this article, 

Many web designers, myself included, come to the web with a background in the graphic arts. We think in pictures, not in code. When we first begin designing for the web, we’ll use HTML and CSS crudely, as a means to an end—a method of arranging pretty boxes in space—without grasping the true nature of the box itself or what it contains. Altering that strictly visual mentality is the highest hurdle to overcome when a graphic designer first dives into semantics and web standards. For the visual designer, really understanding web standards means you’ll have to change the way you think about design.

So yes… 48 hours and counting since I’ve meddled with the WordPress code. But well I guess its good that I’m trying to conquer and discipline my CSS coding because neat code is good code. 

Digressing. 

Back to what I was saying about Illustrator, I finally decided to use it (clearing I’m trying to ‘up’ my level here in terms of my own web design skillz…) because vectors are pretty and Lizzy wanted to design a pretty vector header. 

However.

What emerged instead, was something so uncharacteristically cute, that I cannot bring myself to splash it all over the face of my blog. 

I present to you… Lizzy. 

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Yes. An entire afternoon and that’s the best I could come up with. My skills will get better with practice. This is my first attempt with Illustrator after all. Anyway since it turned out looking so ridiculously adorable, I decided I’ll just use it for my bio-data. You can see the full thing by viewing the ‘About’ page. 

Of course, since I was the one drawing it I could take every liberty to make myself look as cute as possible – decked in my usual outfit (the only characteristic part of this image, clearly) – racerback tank (yes the turquoise one that I wear so often), shorts, one of my many many butterfly accessories and…. well I was going to draw legs and my (almost new) hot pink/silver Dorothy Perkins slippers but it was getting too tedious (give chance! First attempt!). 

So yes.. behold… an intolerably cute… Lizzy. 

Uhm.

I shall get back to trying to design a REAL layout for my blog now. 

*totters off*