It’s a great day to be a Democrat and a woman.

I haven’t posted in awhile, but here is a quick run down of the good, the bad, and the ugly from my day today.

The Good-I found out that one of my most favorite photoshop brush sites seems to have been raised from the dead. I’m beyond thrilled. I thought (perhaps erroneously) that it had been closed down, but it’s alive, and that’s all that counts.

The Bad–In trying to deal with data from my pig feeding project, I’ve found that my statistics knowledge needs some serious help. I took stats as an underground and had a very high A in there, but it’s been almost 7 years and everything has apparently been wiped from my brain.

The Ugly–My most favoritest new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, can’t seem to catch a break. I don’t understand why people aren’t watching. There are rumors flying that it probably will not survive, not to mention the fact that on October 30, NBC is going to try Friday Night Lights in it’s spot… S60 was supposed to be a repeat that night, but still, it’s one of those things that doesn’t sound good. I so desperately want this show to survive, but I’m afraid that NBC will make all the wrong moves. It needs a new time slot. It perhaps needs some time to retool. Letting it just die seems like such a horrible thing when it has so much going for it except that it can’t seem to find an audience.

It’s a few minutes shy of 10 o’clock at night. It’s 94 degress outside–which I think might be the coolest it’s been today. I’m ready for this heat wave to be over with already.

First, yes, for those of you out there wondering, I am still, indeed, alive. I haven’t forgotten about this place, although, it has been neglected somewhat. I intend to remedy that though and have been working on some new layouts, etc.

The blog has also been neglected–not that I’m the world’s most frequent blogger by any stretch of the imagination. In my true and usual fashion, I’m going to write about something of no practical importance or fascination–my out-of-control font, photoshop brush, and photoshop goodies/tutorials collections. We’ll start with the fonts.

I am a font junkie going on 12 years now. It started when we bought our first family computer back in 1994 and has continued to this day. My current font collection has been carefully cultivated and cared for over those 12 years as I’ve given in time and time again to the insatiable urge to install or download one more pretty, shiny, and possibly useful font. I’m one of those people who if I get a new program, I must install and check out every single font that comes with it. I scour free font sites on the Internet, always in search of the perfect font. As one might expect, my font collection can grow completely out of control at times and requires some pruning. Well, it’s been fifteen months since the last big clean-out. For the longest time, the collection seemed manageable. Despite my font junkie-ness, I hadn’t really been accumulating new ones at a very rapid rate–until recently. Tonight as I was trying to pick a font for a project, I realized that things are once again out of control. At this moment, I have right at 700 fonts on my computer–if you don’t count bold, italic, and bold italic versions of the font faces that have them. Something has to be done. My big plan is to sort through the masses of fonts on this machine and cull it down to, hopefully, somewhere around 400 fonts. 400 sounds pretty reasonable…at least to me… I always hate the process–I have to hem and haw over every font. Realistically, though, I know there are a bunch in there that I’ve never used and will never use. In general usage, there are only a handful of fonts that I pretty much turn to over and over again. For web design, I have a group of 5-7 sans-serif fonts and a group of 5-7 serif fonts that I pretty much stick to consistently. I may change the order in the stylesheet on occasion, but basically, there are only about 10-14 fonts I use for web design. I have the group of fonts that windows and applications use–like Times New Roman, Arial, and Wingdings. I have another group of fonts that gets to see some play in graphics making–probably about 15-20 that I turn to over and over again… I really don’t need 700 fonts ready and waiting… If I need something unusual, I can just load it temporarily. It’s not like I really need 400 either, but you know, it makes me feel better.

The Photoshop-related collections are something that really only got started in the last year or so. For the longest time, I just used the basic brushes that came with Photoshop, then I started checking out a few sites, and before I knew it… I have no clue how many brush sets I have, but I do usually do better managing the brushes than the fonts. I have the bulk of them organized in a folder outside of the photoshop presets one. They’re sorted loosely into favorite brushes and infrequently used brushes. Below those categories, I have them organized into folders by brush type–lyric brushes, 100×100 icon brushes, large texture brushes, etc. It works pretty well. Still, I’m trying to curb that somewhat. I think the important thing should be that I not have so many brushes that I forget all what I have…

Textures are a bit more of a problem. I have I don’t know how many sets of 100×100 textures for icons, and I’m also accumulating quite a set of larger ones too that I can use for wallpapers. The larger textures are rare, so I’ll most likely be keeping all of those, but I really need to do something about the smaller ones. A lot of them are similar to each other. Some of them, after looking at them again, aren’t that great or I know I just won’t use. They need to go.

Tutorials is another area that needs beating into submission. It started innocently enough with looking at tutorials sites and picking up the occasional hint. Then, I started reading a couple of graphics tutorial communities on livejournal–mainly looking for hints on coloring and image effects. Now, I’ve saved so many of those (as .mht web archive files) that I have no clue what’s what. I’m going to have to cull some of those out and sort what’s left so when I want to find that tutorial on the blue/tan coloring, I know where to find it.

I’m leaving in basically two weeks for a short trip home to Kentucky. Sorting through part of this mess on the computer is definitely on the agenda. Perhaps once I get it all sorted down to non-overwhelming numbers, I can actually set down and make something in photoshop or for the web…

I realize this blog entry is likely as dull as paint drying, but then again, I know who all is likely reading and probably more than one of you needs to go to font-aholics anonymous and photoshop stuff -aholics anonymous with me. But, you all understand what it’s like…all the pretty fonts, and brushes, and textures, and tutorials…and it’s all free…and it’s all so addictive.. and you just can’t help yourself… Or, at least I can’t. I’m sure once this is all cleaned out, I’ll just start up again and in another 15 months, I’ll be trying to wade through it all once again.

In my internet travels as of late, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by what seems to be a bad trend right now in website design–The Plague of the Tiny. In the past month or so, I’ve stumbled across more lilliputin layouts than I have ever cared to see or attempt to view and navigate. These layouts are typically 300 to 400px wide, with navigation and text all set in about what appears to be a 2px font (often non-resizable in Internet Explorer). I’m not sure who thought this was a good idea in the first place or why this is seemingly catching on like wild fire. These tiny layouts are hard to read and hard to navigate–particularly when viewed at the higher resolutions used by most monitors and screens today. Yes, Firefox and Netscape do allow for the text to be resized, but often, the layout just ends up breaking. Not to mention, approximately 90% of webusers still use IE for their browsing. I’ve heard and read all the arguments on the “get a modern browser that’s css compliant” argument, but the fact of the matter is that at the end of the day, the lion’s share are still using IE and it just seems like the nice thing to do to make sites look decent, presentable, and readable to those people too.

Another argument that comes up is that the smaller sites are prettier and more elegant. I’m not sure who came up with that idea either. There are lots of sites out there that aren’t miniscule, but are a lot of great looking, easy to navigate, and readable! (Liz’s and Veronica’s sites both come to mind at the moment as being both very attractive but user friendly.)

I’ve heard the argument as well about making sites accessible to those with lower resolutions without the horizontal scrollbar coming up. According to this site, a downright very few people are using devices that aren’t going to accomadate a layout that’s designed for 800×600. Only 0.5% of monitors still in use today use the old 640x 480. A measly 0.05% have msn-tv setup and are viewing sites at a resolution of 544×372. However, 20% are still using 800×600 and a whopping 76% now use a screen with a resolution of 1024×768 or greater!

Of course, as resolution increases, everything on the screen decreases in size–the photos, the text, the whole dang layout. So, when it comes to those itsy bitsy tiny layouts, most of the world is going to be left squinting at their screens! I’m currently on a computer with a screen resolution of 1024×768, and the text on one site I’m viewing is just down right infimantessially small. I’ve also checked out this site on my own laptop at home–1600 x 1200 resolution. It’s practially impossible to read on that one. Now, imagine the poor souls who have some of the newer screens and monitors with a resolution that has a width exceeding 2000 pixels? I’m sure it’s likely completley indeciperable to those folks. It has been predicted that over time, screen resolutions are only going to continue to increase. If this Plague of the Tiny continues as it seems to have lately, we are no longer going to be able to browse the internet.

I do admit that, in the past, I’ve been guilty of the fixed-size text thing for Internet Explorer. In my defense, that was before I learned how to build a non-breakable (or at least hard to break) css layout. I’ve been working to remedy that fixed-size thing and move on to using scalable units for font-sizes. I’ll admit that the keywords thing (small, x-small, large, etc.) is pretty limiting and that whole thing with em’s is kind of wacky, but percentages are quite lovely. As a designer, you can have lots of control over what the initial font-size is, but if some poor soul out there doesn’t want to have to squint and they only have IE, then they can resize the text at least. I figure it’s the least I can do. I don’t want to make anyone go blind while trying to read one of my sites.