So here I am sitting at the hospital. It’s 6:10 AM. The last time I spent the night in a hospital was a few years back, in Singapore. In Singapore I probably spent a total of 14 nights in the hospital. This time around I am here with Grandpa in Roseville.

I can’t help but look at him while he sleeps and think about things I usually don’t think about. I usually don’t think about my life in a “big picture” view. But as I watch him I think about what it’d be like to be his age and have 82 years behind me. I wonder how i’d measure up. What would I think of myself. Would I be happy with what I’d done with my life? What am I going to wish I did more of? What am I going to wish I did less of?

So often we think of old age and think of everything thats behind a person. But when I’m of an age thats ripe and old, I still want to be thinking about the future. I still want to be thinking about how I can serve other people. How will I be able to love my wife better? I don’t want to stop learning and growing with time. Just because my body may be tired and weary doesn’t mean I want to have a mind and spirit thats tired.

I want every day to still be fresh. I want every person that I come in contact with to still be just as fun and interesting as it is now. Granted there may not be the thrill and excitement of new adventures at that age. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn to appreciate details all the more. So my question is, “how?”

I wonder if it’s not wrong to say, “live for the past.” Not in the sense that you never live for the future. But rather, live for how you will think of your past. Sure it could be said in a more normal way, “live with no regrets.” Or maybe I should say, “live for future past joys.” Live with no regrets sounds as if you were going to live with a bunch of regrets. I think I like that, Live for future past joys.

So we’ve all seen a lot of bad uses of fonts. But then sometimes we find ourselves being the very culprits of bad font usage. Or perhaps you find yourself stuck in the rut of using the same font over and over again. While there are many great fonts out there, one should consider changing fonts for different ocassions, but also for different applications.

Now when I use the word “application” i don’t mean print, web or some other medium. I mean the particular arena in which the font will bue used. For example if you are going to use a font for a church, that may not be a good font to use for a children’s day care. Or if you are creating a website for a corporation, giving them a destroyed font may not be your choice either. It all depends on the application and audience.

With that said, here are a couple of pet peves that I’ve picked up over the years from many different sources.

Papyrus - This font just sucks. Now if you’re guilty of using it, don’t go out and hang yourself. My guess would be that most people use it because they somehow think it’s fancy, but modern. Or they want a textured looking font. So rather than find the right font and apply texture, they find Papyrus. Papyrus is technically a bad font. Poor construction. Difficult to read.

Comic Sans - There is an entire website dedicated to ridding the world of this font. I don’t particularly hate this font. However one must understand that it was created for comic book text. This font should never ever be used to typeset a book, formal paper, or aything beyond one sentence. It wasn’t made for that.

Some basic things to consider when selecting a font:Â

1. Consider your audience. I’ve seen lots of flyers targeted at a young crowd using some old traditional looking font. More often than not it’s Times New Roman. Times isn’t bad, but who’s kidding who. Times is very formal and stiff looking.
2. Legibility. Now on the other side of cold and dry fonts are overly animated/ornate looking fonts. Whether the font is destroyed looking or ultra frilly, neither is legible. People find fonts like RAGE Italic and squeeze the type together and write a whole story and some how think other people can read it. They can’t. And if people can’t read your message, you’re better off not giving it.

 Some other basics to using fonts:

1. Try to narrow your design/document down to two major fonts. Don’t go crazy using a different font for every heading. This creates a very disjoined unorganized looking design.
2. Be creative with just one font. You can use one font with bolds, different sizes, compressed, extended and even italic. One font can be used in so many different ways. Use it.
3. Use a san serif font or serif font depending on your content. San serif gives off a very clean and modern look. Serifed fonts can also be clean, however they make a document look very formal and sometimes a little rigid.

Those are just a few thoughts on fonts for now. Now go start fonting.

Lately I’ve been branching out and exploring different styles of design. I dont’ feel I’ve strayed from the fundamental roots that I’ve learned. These roots include principals of color, white space, and movement. However I do feel that I am moving away from the ultra plain ultra obvious type of design and getting into an exploratory mode.

One area I feel I am branching out (as far as my own designs are concerned) is color. While I do have a strange affinity toward monochromatic or even duotone designs, I am learning just how to design with not even a full spectrum but tri tone and quad tone. It adds an entirely new dimension.

When color is not in the equation, the only parties responsibility for movement on a page are size, form, and density. But when color is on the page, a completely new element is responsible for one’s eye crawling across your pages or screen. I can’t decide in my mind whether color or form holds a greater posession on the eye. No matter how crazy a black shape you have, if there is a red dot in its center, your eye will be sucked into the red dot.

Another element that I am learning and exploring is depth. This all started really because of a friend of mine (Cindy Tsang’s) critique of one of my pieces. So take this very simple drawing. Now take the words underneath the piece. There is a great conflict in my brain as far as depth is concerned. The writing because of it’s opacity appears to be behind the tree. Though because of overlap, we know it is placed in front of the tree. This might be okay if it carried the same dimensional qualities as the tree. Do you see the problem? So I guess I would have to say I’m learning the idea of recession into space without using a plain. Rather recision purely by color and weight.

Thats what I’m pondering right now. But in the mean time here are some of my most recent pieces I thought I’d share.

• Theophilus layout (Alpha)
• VOX Postcards 1, 2, 3
• Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church, FOPC Reflect Business Card

Theres more. But nothing I want to post at the moment. Cheers! We’re off to a great week!

So I’m still still quite new to CSS. Sure I’ve been using all the little things built into Dreamweaver. But it hasn’t been until recently that I really dove into learning the tricks and tips of the whole CSS thing. It really is quite powerful and has lots of advantages over Tables. However tables do carry the advantage when it comes to large amounts of raw data. I thought I’d write some tips and ideas if you’re new to CSS. Perhaps these will help you in your early quest into CSS.

Old School Versus New School:

1. So you may ask, why should I use a CSS class over a FONT tag?

   One of the major reasons for using a class is that you are removing the need to repeat the definition of a style over and over again. With a font tag, you have to define size, color, and other attributes every time you want a particular style. With a CSS class, you can make a class and call it over and over again.

   Not only can you call it over and over again but when you change the styles attributes, everything changes instantly. None of that tedious Find and Replace stuff.

2. You can use CSS also to have much greater control over your typography. I remember back say 7 years ago when I first started using HTML. There was no such thing as Leading, kerning, padding, or margins. With you CSS you can control everything. I mean everything.
3. Next reason is things just look sexy. With CSS you can style just about everything. From mouse overs to background colors. You don’t have to use an Image (JPG, GIF, PNG) to have decent looking text. You can style it in CSS. You can layer too! Now thats a nice advantage. Layering used to SUCK back when I was a kid.

Layouts

1. Some people may think the three column layout is easier to do in CSS. I’m not one of those. I still love my tables. However it is useful to learn how to do the threecolumn in CSS. WHy? Because every major app (Wordpress, osCommerce, Joomla, Drupal…) is layed out with CSS.
2. CSS however does let you tweak your site to the pixel. It also does a great job with percentages. Lets say you want your site to scale up and down with the size of the browser. Every class can scale with its parent class. Nice advantage.

How to Learn it:

• CSS Play - Lots of fun ideas for CSS - http://www.cssplay.co.uk/
  
• CSS Zen Garden - Shows off the true flexibility of using CSS for layouts - http://www.csszengarden.com/
• HOVER - a guide to styling your links in CSS - http://www.echoecho.com/csslinks.htm

Thats a start. Of course there is tons more to CSS than what I’ve outlined here. But those are some of my thoughts on it for now.

so I decided to take some time out this weekend and get this old blog looking a bit more alive so I won’t be embarassed to start promoting it. I’d also have to say the content for this blog is a bit week. No particular order to the madness. With what I have been doing lately it’s as if I should just have Xanga. Well, I’m back again to save the day! I’ think I may focus a lot of my enerty blogging about youth ministry but also about graphic design. This entry right here kind of speaks for itself it’ all about design right now baby!!

One of the big reasons for the upgrade in the blog is because in today’s market so many people do name searches on you and never know what will come up. Whether it’s a school alumni homepage or your listing on Craigslist, your name is easy to find.

So here we are. BLOG 2.0