Ardentli.Net

I met up with Kristine, one of my best buddies from high school, on Weds night. This was the first time I had seen her in four years and she suggested me bringing back Time Limit, a forum that I started when we all were 12 or 13. I’ve closed and reopened this forum probably 4-5 times now over the years, but it’s nostalgic and fun, so I’ve decided to restart it yet again.

http://timelimitmb.com

We usually have quite an eclectic following of members that have been with us over the years. It’s by no means a girl-only, fluffy, rainbows and kisses MB. We’ve had a wide range of people from anime diehards, artsy hipsters, anarchists, and regular ol’ people (by these standards anyway) like me.

Feel free to join. I just registered the domain this morning so the ISP might not work right just yet. Additionally nothing much is up so don’t be scared away by a blank, default template.

I’ve been a blogger for a long time on and off since I was 12 years old (so a good decade now. Yeesh, I’m getting old.) and there are a few things I’ve noted over that time that can really make or break a blogging experience for me.

Ads, ads, ads. I know it's blogger, but seriously. I circled FOUR ads on the top of the page (not including bottom).

• I Am An ADD Child (not really). First off, I have a short, short attention span. The first time I visit a blog I give it about a 20 second rule. If it doesn’t catch my eye in that time, I move along to another site. So, a classy design is pretty much a must. It doesn’t have to be over the top, but any poorly designed, boring site will be passed over by me really fast. I also hate blogs that are “paid to blog” sites where every other entry is some sort of review. It’s annoying to read about your photography one day and then read about this new totally awesome household item with three random hyperlinks in it to the product.

This is actually not from a blog, but this is the size of the site's text and the color scheme.

• Typography is kind of a big deal. I can’t stand blogs that have very itsy, bitsy font or fonts that don’t have adequate line height between them. Another equally as awful blog attribute are those with crazy background patterns or designs and font colors on top that are illegible. They give me headaches. If I have to CTRL+ your page to read it, I probably won’t be coming back. It was really trendy a few years back for girl web designers to do these tiny fonts on top of over-the-top layouts. I’ve always been a fan of readability since that’s what people are coming to see.
• Blogging about boring things bores. A lot of people who have public blogs tend to blog about their daily life. Nothing wrong with that. The problem in it lies in the fact that most of your entries are terribly boring. They go something along the lines of: “Today I woke up at 10 and then I fed the dog. And then I decided that I was going to go outside, so I went outside, but it was hot so I went back inside and sat and watched tv for a couple hours. Then I went and made dinner and talked to my friend on the phone–” blah, blah, blah. It’s boring to read and no one cares! Unless I know you personally I find these types of blogs to be horrors to read. I’d much rather people pick the most interesting thing and blog on that, but as a golden rule only blog about things other people would find intresting.
• Walls of text are bad. Some bloggers tend to write monstrous paragraphs that give me migraines. I suppose this would go under typography, but I felt it deserved its own point because it drives me nuts. Be succinct and break your paragraphs up, please.
• Lacking personality. A lot of blogs lack any sense of personality. You’ll read their entries and get no sense of feel for the kind of person they are. Entries are dull, lifeless, and boring. These kinds of blogs I also tend to never read.

I so very much wish that I was born with a more creative, artistic mind.

There are tons of portfolios and blogs on the web with such great, awesome designs that I aspire to. Here are a couple of my all-time favorites!

CSS Zen Garden

Oh wow, I could say tons of things about CSS Zen Garden. The premise of this site is users can submit layouts that modify only the CSS of the page. There are tons of beautiful, awesome designs which really shows the power and art that CSS contains.

Elysium Burns

Elysium Burns is a great example of design via typography. It’s just so attractive and through font faces and sizes alone. I hope that one day I’ll have a great grasp of typography like Sean does.

Time For Cake

Oh wow, I don’t really know much about their services or anything, but Time For Cake has one lovely website design. It’s just the most colorful and fun layout ever. I love the use of color, patterns, and design.

Webdesigner Depot

I really want to work on my skills with Adobe Illustrator so I can make some sweet looking vector layouts like at the Webdesigner Depot. Their designs even look great in my super-duper high-resolution. 8D Much love for their designs.

I have a ton of other favorites, but it would take me forever to make note of them all. :3 I’ve spent the last few hours seriously just surfing the web and looking at beautiful web designs.

I’ve finally got around to making a custom layout. It’s nothing spectacular, but at least it’s no longer a pre-made template (if you’re seeing anything funky it’s probably because I’m not done editing the layout yet!).

Spring quarter is finally coming to a close. I have another week of classes and then a week of finals before I can finally put this quarter behind me. It’s been a flurry of exams and projects so I’ve had to put a lot of my online endeavors on the back burner. Hopefully I’ll have a little more time to get some of my projects done.

I’m having a great time perusing the tutorials over at Smashing Magazine. I love all their issues on typography. I seriously wish the web supported more than the basic font families. I’m hoping in the next few years browsers will evolve such that you can use any font and it’ll be imported into the user’s browser so that we can have all kinds of beautiful web interfaces. I’m also in the process of expanding my web development skills a bit and learning AJAX. I’m assured there’s not much to it (and it doesn’t appear there really is). It’s so refreshing just to be able to sit and learn things at my leisure versus them being projects in class.

P.S. In regard to Bare Minerals from my previous entry, I returned my starter kit. I didn’t like how the makeup made my face look super shiny and it just wasn’t giving me the right amount of coverage. I’m a bit on the disappointed side. I heard so many great reviews. Oh well, on to the next best, new thing I suppose.