Heidi's Blog

I’m loving Sassy CSS

Heidi — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 23:52:37 +0000

It may be the pain killers I’m on after having my wisdom teeth removed this week, but I am loving Sassy CSS and Zen Coding. I have always wished for variables in my CSS, for color values that I tweak and then have to change in 10 different places and for uniform padding or driving a bunch of measurement changes after I change the width of an element. I love the nested styling, the extended styles and the mixins. I even found a syntax highlighting rule for Notepad++. It was up and running after a quick ruby install and I’m now trying it out with some responsive design techniques.
Zen Coding has also been great so far, the new Python script for Notepad++ was an easy install and I found the CSS based shorthand syntax easy to jump into. Expanding and shrinking selections, moving to the next editing point and quick commenting are some of the functions that I quickly created shortcuts for and started using. Another great feature is the ability to wrap tags around pasted text, I always hated the drudgery involved in writing the opening tag then scrolling to the right and finding the end of the line to put the ending tag. I am definitely including both of these tools in my workflow from now on.

New 3D Project

Heidi — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:58:11 +0000

For the first project in my 3D class we are doing a 15 second product spot. I chose to do a wine glass for my product and did an initial imageboard and storyboard for my animation. I’m learning more about wines in Wines of the World and one of the first things we learned was to hold the glass by the stem so that the glass doesn’t get all mucked up with smudges and finger prints, because one of the important parts of wine tasting is looking at the appearance of the wine.

I thought first of having wine in the glass, but liquid would be a bit ambitious for this first project so I wanted to use light to give the impression of the wine. I wanted a spotlight in a dark space with high contrast, atmosphere and low saturation. This was my first image board with this in mind.

Image Board

In my storyboard I have the wine glass rolling into the spotlight and I wanted to manipulate the light that passes through the glass in the wider shots so that the first color is introduced only in the light coming from the glass, to give that impression of the wine. For the image of the glass itself I thought of classic, traditional glasses and script fonts for the titling to give it a traditional, old world, vinyard feel.

First Storyboard

Sagmeister Project Update

Heidi — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:38:43 +0000

After putting up my posters yesterday I got the chance to go the “Design and Happiness” lecture by Sagmeister that night. Some of what he talked about was new from other lectures that I had watched in videos but he was much more down to earth and entertaining than what I had been expecting from watching those videos. All in all it was a good talk, and not to long either. I also got to see many of the other projects that people did for the challenge in the slide show before the presentation. After putting up my posters yesterday I got a lot of responses from passersby.

Woman means responses

Woman gives responses

Woman fights for responses

Woman is responses

Woman Wants Responses

Sagmeister “Design that touches the Heart” project

Heidi — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:58:40 +0000

I have been working on a project for Sagmeister’s “Design that touches the Heart” challenge. I decided explore people’s reactions to the concept of “woman” through a series of posters. The term “Woman” was paired with a prompting term and people are encouraged to write their responses on the poster. Today I hung these posters around the Art Building along with markers to encourage people to write. Here are the original posters, I will make a follow-up post when I have some responses:

Woman Is

Woman Wants

Woman Means

Woman Gives

Woman Fights For

New blog location

Heidi — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:30:03 +0000

I’ve moved! I am moving my blog from RIT’s servers onto my own site, but right now I am having a problem making a backup of my old blog, so for older posts you can still use my old blog until I fix the problem.