• Awesome Space Nebula
  Mmmm layered nebulas
  (tags: space space-nebula nebula stock-images stock layers photoshop graphicriver GD-Stock)

Not much time but in the interest of starting to make blogging more habitual, here is a short post.

Christmas is almost here and I am soo excited to spend it with Kristy and I hope she likes what I got her! Our decorations are up and we just got some more wrapping paper so now I have more choices for wrapping presents. I love wrapping presents, of all the things that could be called crafty that I have tried, wrapping presents is the best to me. Just wish I had more tools for doing it. I had a stockpile of tissue paper, bows, boxes and ribbon, but it was one of those things that we decided we didn’t need when we moved so we threw it away. I miss it but I’m excited to start a new collection.

Speaking of which, if you are in my neck of the woods and don’t like to wrap your presents, invite me over and I would love to do the wrapping for you, though if its a lot of presents I might have to charge you a meal ;).

Back to work now

• Stone & Rock | Texture Lovers
  (tags: GD-Textures texture free)

I feel like this blog is getting away from what I originally intended its primary content to be - my spiritual walk in like. But you know what oh wells at least I am posting something new :).

So I decided I wanted to try and be one of the people on the leading edge of HTML 5 so it can be one less thing in the future that I am trying to play catch up with. True, full HTML 5 support won’t be out until sometime in the 2020s (I am pretty sure I read that somewhere but of course when I go to search for the year I can’t find it ><) but might as well start now since Firefox 3.5 is now supporting HTML 5. And thanks to the folks at Smashing Magazine I can get a great running start on my HTML 5 learnin’ by following their “HTML 5 Layout from Scratch” tutorial.

How does Pixelmator fit in to this you ask (and if you didn’t let’s just pretend you did ;))? Well unsatisfied to learn and tinker with only HTML 5, I will be doing the design work in Pixelmator, a really nice Mac graphics program that I just bought and have so far enjoyed using. It’s true that doing the design end would be easier in Photoshop, but unfortunately I am no longer privy to Adobe’s image editing juggernaut (write or tweet me if you want to know the story). But then again if I used Photoshop I wouldn’t get to share even more new stuff about my experiences with Pixelmator.

I will be doing my testing/designing at this site: hangerbay.fxrdesign.com and trying to keep you up do date here at CToW about it’s progress.

So far what I have learned from starting to code my uber simple HTML 5 page is:

• Though the SM tutorial shows that <meta charset=”utf-8″ /> is the tag to use for declaring your character set, the w3c validator errors out on it. Solution: use the the standard meta tag declaration <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>. Yes its more to remember but it validates like soft butter…err something like that.
• Panic’s Coda doesn’t have code prompts for the semantic HTML 5 tags…let’s get with in Panic I have a 2020 deadline to meet

Every so often I will check my cafepress account to see if any of the shirts I have designed, have been bought. I checked early this week to find that one of my designs has sold 2 shirts to 2 different people and though is is great, it’s kinda perplexing that the selling design is the one that I put the least thought into and the one I don’t think I executed the best?!

Here is the shirt:

The original idea behind this shirt came from Kristy saying I was always so warm and me joking that I was powered by a thermonuclear reactor as opposed to a heart. So I get why I would buy this shirt (which oddly enough I haven’t) but are there really that many people out there that have thought the same thing?

This shirt on the other hand no one has bought and I think it is one of my cooler designs:

I call it the Robot Zero shirt. This shirt came from me wanting to do a grungy, sci-fi design using a robot illustration I did that I was really happy with.

What are your thoughts, CToW reader, would you join the masses (masses being 3 so far) of people clamouring for the Nuclear Core shirt, or do you think the resisting the Robot Zero shirt is futile? And feel free to leave a comment with links to any shirts you have designed that you don’t get why they are, or why they aren’t selling.