Rearranged my Room and My Design Process

Cabin fever struck again yesterday as I was working on an essay.  A few posts ago I uploaded pictures of my room.  That’s the set up I’ve had for a very long time, but my room is a lot more vacant now that I’ve moved a lot of packed up boxes back home, the set up was not working.  My bed is on wheels and my floor is tile – and crooked.  Seriously, when I’m on my wheeled computer chair, I’m always rolling into the wall from the tilted floor.  My bed also suffers the same fate.  Whenever I shift, I slowly roll towards the middle of the room.  (XD!  It’s freaky!  The little wheel locks don’t seem to work on the frame, but I can’t complain because I got it for free.)  I had solved the problem before by making “end tables” of boxes to keep my bed grounded.  Since they’re gone, I turned my bed 90 degrees in the same corner, and my desk just fits beside it, wedging the bed between the wall and the desk.  I moved my dresser to where my bed long-wise used to be, wedging it in on the other side.  Myshelf that used to be above my desk looks a little weird because there’s nothing underneath it anymore, haha, but overall, I’m happy to not be rolling around!

No picture evidence because I’m lazy right now.   I’m reading Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright.  I absolutely love it so far.  It’s the story of two sisters, an elder one who lives in a small village in Canada as a school teacher and a younger one who lives in New York USA working in the exciting radio business.  It’s set in the 1930s and the novel is written in a series of letters and diary entries.   Saying much more would spoil it.  I’m only 100 pages in so far (it’s about 400 pages), but it’s really interesting.

I wish I had started reading it earlier.  I actually wasn’t even planning to read it.  It’s for one of my courses and there’s a small 1% quiz on it, but other than that, there’s no exam or essay on it.  Considering the work that I have to do on other things worth 25% or more, I was going to skip it.  I started reading it last night as I was trying to sleep and could not put it down until it was about 1am and I knew I’d have to sleep, hehe.  Whoops.

Unfortunately the quiz is today and there’s no way I can finish the book by 2pm.  But I’m planning to read as far as I can and see what happens at the quiz.

Randomly:  I think it’s interesting to see how people go about creating their designs, so I decided to show my process for designing the graphics Frozen Flower’s layout.  I actually meant to post this a while ago, but it never saw the light of day:

I had a lot of fun with this design because most of the work actually happened before I got to the computer stages. I hand drew this layout over a short period of days, working on it in the short 10 minute gaps waiting for classes to start or the coffee breaks in the middle of three hour lectures.  For the flowers, I used my own photography as a guide while drawing them.

I want to start using my own drawings and photography for design rather than using anime or video game pictures.  As much as I love those topics, it’s hard, because really, it’s somewhat illegal (though many claim “fair use” and a lot of these companies see it as free publicity).  Though the design and coding is mine, the graphic base belongs to the companies and artists that make those images.  I want the code, the design, the everything to be created by me.  But, my main site Magitek Designs relies on those subjects, so I’m somewhat conflicted.  I think if I didn’t make anime or video game layouts anymore ever, I would lose visitors, maybe.  I’m not sure!  Unless any companies complain about my use of their images, I’m probably okay.  I think about these things a lot even though I’ve been concentrating on school more than working on my sites.

I’ve been itching to make Wordpress templates!  And I’ve also been itching to put together this new PHP idea for the Series section of Magitek Designs.  I’m looking forward to summer to be able to work on these projects!

29 days until home.  ^_^

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.