"Too good to be true!"
It never ceases to amuse me when I unwittingly discover that I've been an ant farmer for, well, who knows how long. This morning, when I took out the garbage, I found that the traces of tuna salad that had clung to a disposable plate that had been thrown away a week ago was the source of a formic parade extending from my trash can to a nearly imperceptible crack in the wall. Thankfully the vespoids had not been there long enough to attract other critters, namely predators like centipedes and spiders. That's one surprise I wouldn't welcome with such a humor. (Ugh, just writing about them already has me jerking my head at every sudden shadow, afraid it's another octoped intruder.)
I'm finding this ordeal of being the Design and Layout Editor of the Serious Ting to be somewhat daunting. NEWSFLASH: I forgot how poor I am about managing open, very unstructured tasks. And what I'm faced with, every time I go to typeset another article for this edition (due to go to print at the end of this month), is a blank page. Not a wireframe template, not a sketch drawing, just a blank page. And it's ferociously staring right back at me. Mind you, it's not the blankness itself that is intimidating; this text-entry page is blank every time I sit down to it, which is considerably often. Rather, I think, it's the nearly infinite possibilities that can go onto it, each with their own pros, cons, flair, authorship, contrivance, taste, look, and feel. Should I use a background? Should it be a full-page photo? Or should it be a soft gradient? Should I go light to dark? Should it be a vertical or a horizontal gradient? Or should it be circular? Should it be behind text, or should they be separated by an opaque text box? Should the box have rounded corners, or square? Or should the box have a soft, embossed edge with no stroke? Should each item have its own box, or should they be all in one? Should the thumbnails be fully enclosed in the box, or should they hang over the edge?
...
Or should I use a border instead of a background?
No comments:
Post a Comment