Dishwasher rant

Just had to let off steam. One of THE most annoying things is unloading the dishwasher to find that a dish or pan or piece of cutlery seemed to escape blasts of cleaning power and has retained its layer of food. This is annoying in itself. But then, cleaning said item is fifteen times harder once its been through the dishwashing process than it would have been washing the damn thing up in the first place. The dishwashing process seems to seal food on with some kind of varnish so that huge amounts of hand-cramping energy is required to chip, soak and scrub said food particles off. Fails to improve my mood.

IE 3 pixel float problem, or the 'wavy alignment' problem as I like to call it

I first encountered this problem when I built my first CSS layout website. I got round it with some nasty fudgey fixes but originally put it down to my inexperience and figured I hadn't used as good a technique at constructing the page as I might. The problem I am referring to is an IE issue where floating a column to the left causes a weird left-alignment rendering where the column to the right's text, as it flows beyond the height of the left-hand column, kicks over 3 pixels and causes a kind of wave to the text. Its beautifully illustrated on the CSSplay website, http://cssplay.co.uk/boxes/floatfix.html.

I soon realised there was more going on than my inexperience as this problem continued to crop up so I investigated further and found the above fix. I merrily applied 'display: inline-block' to my stylesheet and was delighted that it fixed the problem. It didn't even break in Firefox. Then some time later I realised it fell apart in Opera. Instead of the right hand div sitting alongside the left-hand float, the right hand div would sit below. Grrrr. I realised then I would have to use a hack so the 'display: inline-block' would only apply to IE. With that in place, the page worked fine in IE, Firefox and Opera.

Blonde moments in abundance

Dooooooh - I've really had a frustrating day. One of those days where your brain keepsdwelling on things you need to be doing several steps ahead and leaves you with zero resources for coping with current tasks. Consequently, I have found myself cursing my computer at regular intervals for reasons that have been no fault of its own. Poor slaptop! Its been shrugging its shoulders at me all day, saying 'whaaaaaat??' with an exasperated expression.

I was working on something in Illustrator and was trying to send one object behind another. Despite selecting 'arrange' > 'send to back' a gazillion times, it failed to respond. I cursed a few times, tried again. Clicked off everything then tried again. No. I started shouting 'STOP IGNORING WHAT I'M ASKING YOU TO DO, YOU*****!' But it ignored that too. I then turned to a colleague and said 'Its blatantly ignoring me!! Watch..' I went through the procedure again, to no avail. He glanced over my shoulder and said 'the objects are on separate layers' How stupid did I feel??? I knew it too - as soon as he pointed it out. Grrr. The same thing happened later - I couldn't for the life of me work out why a certain menu option wasn't available and sat racking my brains trying to remember how I'd done it before. I eventually grizzled to same colleague and in an instant, he resolved it. And at that same instant, it all came flooding back in a horrible 'thanks, brain, for remembering now its too late' torrent.

Ah well, I ain't blonde for nothing!

Design - conscious decision-making or an organic process

Today I've been designing a logo for a friend's new company. Over the weekend I'd been turning over the logo device that I wanted to create in the back of my mind. I'd decided on the kind of style I wanted it to take on, the shapes and the colour. However, I almost knew at that point that the end result wouldn't closely resemble what I'd had in mind. It rarely does. So as I was working through my ideas today, getting what was in my mind down on paper, it got me wondering whether that made me a bad designer.

Very occasionally, I have a gut feel about how a project should look and work and I'll end up with a product that's not far from my original vision. But I have to say, rightly or wrongly, this is rare. This doesn't mean to say I or the customer or the user is unhappy with the end result, but it sometimes moves far from my original concept. Part of me thinks this is the way the process should work. Its certainly the way we tend to get taught at college and university. You shouldn't stick with the first idea that comes into your head. You should work through ideas and be prepared to drop concepts, however attached you may have become to them. If its not right, it shouldn't be forced.

But then again, shouldn't I be able to make a design work? Is it a cop out to let things develop away from a design decision? Obviously, different projects require a different design approach and sometimes the development of an idea is more appropriate in order to work out what works best.

So does a design benefit from taking the organic approach: is one that has been created via a journey more valid than one that seems to have been arrived at almost instantaneously? Well I guess I reckon no. Neither is right or wrong - it depends what works and whether the final design is successful or not. You could argue that the majority of a design's audience are going to remain unaware of the journey a design has followed - they will draw their conclusion on the result, regardless of the blood, sweat and tears that preceded it!

I've written at bit more on design which you may be interested in reading.