Moving from Photoshop to Fireworks

Now that I'm working on more web based work, I've been hearing a lot of the advantages of Fireworks to Photoshop, and its links to Dreamweaver. I've been a Photoshop user for years and it's a bit hard to change to using a different program but after reading up on a few articles, I think I should give it a go.

This is a video that I have found incredibly useful:

Creating a template with working navigation bar in Fireworks and transporting to Dreamweaver. He uses the old fashion HTML table method but it's good to know how to do it. 

Moving from Muse to Dreamweaver

I've almost finished my website, still have quite a few things to complete it but I'm not going to finish it. I have used the programme Muse which has proved great for starting out and has been a fantastic programme to get my foot into website design but I really want to learn more coding and get the hang of the slightly more "professional" stuff so I'm moving over to Dreamweaver. I've heard it'll take a lot longer to set up a website in Dreamweaver but I think it'll be worth it in the long run. 

At the same time, it will give me the excuse to work on another design for my website. This is the present look at the moment which I'm happy about but would like to see what else I can do with the next.

Digital Design Job Opportunities

I've been hunting up and down for a better job. Not that I can't stand my present job, (with the terrible economy at the moment, I know I'm lucky to have something) but I would like to find something more challenging as I feel I have learnt my fill and can't progress much much in this company. 

I'm sure there are many, like me who have found it hard to find a job and even though I might be increasing my competition, I feel like it would be nice to list the places I have found useful to search for job openings. These aren't the usual job sites, like reed, monster, or the tons of creative recruitment agency sites popping up all over. They are the ones that have the title "Job Boards". Either stand alone or within a website (usually design related). And they are mostly UK/London based.

I'll be adding more along the way but if anyone has any good links that I might have missed out, do let me know. Hopefully, these links will lead someone to their perfect job and hopefully soon, mine too.

Blog Embedding (Update)

I found another code to embed one website (in my case, a blog) in another website. This one makes more sense than the previous one and it's shorter as well. I found out the correct term is an iframe.

I amend the code a little to make it more "user" friendly but here is the original source. The website link, height and width should be changed to your requirements.

The default of the iframe gives a scrolling bar if the website height is more than the height of the iframe. But by adding a little extra code, the scroll bar disappears!

I'm still trying to figure out how to remove the nab bar on blogger, not on the blogger site itself but on the iframe. I know you can remove it by amending the html of the page, but I wonder if you can just remove it by hiding a few pixels from the iframe.

I am also not completely happy with embedding the blog through iframe and would like to find out how to embed it (easily) without the iframe and without the blogger background.

Blog Embedding

I have embedded lots of stuff into the Finn Bonel website I have been working on. There are lots of easy instructions online for embedding a twitter feed, youtube video, google map, etc. but not very many about how to embed a blog into a website. I scoured the web for days (not full days) and found lots of complicated methods that needed lots of coding, some also needed javascript, some that needed sign ups to place rss feeds, I was ready to learn a bit of javascript when I came across this website which provided such a simple html code.

The instructions are to change the bits in bold to your requirement, although I'm not too sure what the first set of measurements do as changes the object size in compose mode but doesn't affect the object size in the browser.  But I just keep them the same to be safe. It would be really good to figure out how to get the embedded site to fit to scale because at the moment, the site is the same scale as you would see in your browser and scrollbars have to be used which is a little difficult to navigate if you have to use both horizontal and vertical scrollbars.

The "Error: Embedded object could not be displayed." message seems unnecessary as it does not appear anywhere, but I assume it appears should your link not work. But it is a very useful code to have and will be using it more, especially once I figure out how to fit the site to scale. 

Not Free, Freelance

I'm meant to be working on my own website but a freelance job came up so my website is on hold.  I cannot complain too much as it is paid work! It's for a music artist, Finn Bonel, which I'm collaborating with my colleague at work to get his website up and running. It's been a good project so far and I've been integrating all the social media stuff into the website although I still need to figure out how to embed a blog into a website which sounds easy... but it's not so straight forward.

I'm still using Muse to get the work done but I am itchy to use a bit more of Dreamweaver as I know it's a bit more professional and the script is much cleaner in the end. It probably will make the website load faster and I'll pick up a bit more html/css/etc. that way too. But I think I'll have to master Muse first before moving on to Dreamweaver, although I'm also afraid I'll get so used to the ease of Muse!

Customised Hiragana Wallpaper

Desktop wallpapers are so common and downloadable for free everywhere, so imagine my surprise when my partner asked me to customise one for him! He has just started learning japanese and found a Hiragana table wallpaper on the internet that he thought was perfect but he wanted a more subdue background. Here is where I found the original but it was also taken from someone else so I don't know who to credit.

I have taken away the old version so please view the new versions here.

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Related Posts

Free Hosting and Domain

I've been working on my website and it's my first website that I am making for myself. I've made websites for the company I work for but never made one for myself and since cash is extremely tight at the moment, I'm trying to do it without having to spend a penny.  

Although I haven't spent any money yet, I have spent a lot of time trawling the web researching for the most suitable free domains, web hosts, etc. for my website. So some might say time is worth more than money but at the moment, I rather lose a little sleep than splash out on a website that might last only few months.

So what have I chosen? I went with xtreemhost as it seemed to have good reviews and gave a decent amount of bandwidth and space. 

And I got a .tk domain as it was the shortest free domain I could find, and my name was still available. I can only use the forwarding service and can't set up the DNS service (it took me ages to figure that out). It's okay for now but I might have to shop around for another hosting site should I ever want to use subdomains.

But now that I know the domain and hosting works, the techi stuff is over for now and I better concentrate on getting the right content for the website.

From Stitch to Pixel

So it's about time I start my own website after using blogger as a "pseudo" website for ages to put up my work. But my work has also changed. I have been working as a full time graphic designer for about 5 months now and have been learning all sorts. So I'm presently working on my website at the moment using an Adobe program called Muse.

I have been using it for my job and it's been pretty great to work with, aside from the few glitches as it's still in beta mode, and me making my own mistakes as I get use to using it.

Above is the lookbook website I did for work, also using Muse.

And here is a snapshot of my new logo and website that I'm presently working on. The font is called Demming by Mike Fortress and I used Illustrator to align the fonts and outlines, and Photoshop to create the textured effects.

If you like unique retro fonts, Lost Type Co-Op is a great website to download them from. It's a Pay-What-You-Want Type Foundry where users have the opportunity to pay whatever they like for a font, or even for free.

Let's see where this change in my career will lead me. I am enjoying learning new programs and it's still extremely creative and it's still design. It's not using materials like needles and yarns but I still stitch during my free time and will always continue to do so.