- Frank Chimero

However, what I could recall while trying to remember the work that I have been doing since graduation, were the feelings that I had experienced throughout this period of time. Sometimes it was pain. Sometimes, uncertainty and fear of rejection. Most of the time it was just contentment. Working life had become the way I lived or behaved at home. You do not take special account into what goes on there – you just do it, live with it, and for every single day of your life you learn some things and move on. When people ask how’s work – my response stayed the same.

I suppose there is just this thin line between being at home and at work. It almost felt the same. The only difference is, I do not get to lie on my bed or play my console games. And that there is no excuse for going back to bed when waking up to a nice, rainy weather great for sleeping in.

We may think that we have heard or known enough of things. There is an overwhelming list of articles out there on the web, ready for you to digest and be sucked dry into. But honestly, nothing beats hearing them in person. The atmosphere and energy present makes it even more refreshing. We laugh and agree in unison. That’s not the same as retweeting an inspirational story and interacting with comments from other users. When in a live audience, the responses are spontaneous and there is no beating about the bush.

Funny, though, how we are constantly asking the same questions over and over again, and whilst expecting to hear the same kind of answers, we often end up being clueless about most things. But right now, I can safely say that I am over and done with hearing them. The truth is to just follow your heart and have your own opinions about things. We all know what our hearts tell us.

It was nothing to be proud of, since I would have woken earlier back in the days of Secondary school. In these two years of working in the design industry, I had forgotten how painful it was to wake up at a time like this. I took my own sweet time to shower. The air was so cold, the skies were still dark – and I thought to myself, how in the hell I would be able to withstand an entire day later on at work?

But there is something refreshing about attending a talk early in the morning at 8am. Unlike in the past where it was for educational purposes, this time it was for something different. It was for something that I knew I would enjoy.

CreativeMornings, a monthly free breakfast lecture series, is a brilliant idea for people who need to go to work at 10 in the morning. I got to know about this event through my friend (who keeps himself updated about design-related activities all the time, if not a lot more than me), so we decided to sign up for it and headed down together. After which, we had breakfast at Food for Thought which was just nearby, and then I scooted off to work.

So there went my less-than-usual Friday morning, and soon enough mundane weekend returned just in time for lazy bones.

You can check out CreativeMornings here.

Three weeks ago I embarked on my one-week journey to attaining eternal peace, hoping that I would spend some time to try and get myself back together (in other words – to start committing myself to doing my own things). I truly imagined it would be a good chance for me to finally settle my to-do list, since our company was finally taking a break for year-end.

However, what really happened was me spending most of my time going out, lazing at home or playing my console games. There was a Christmas sleepover in between and it was a fun night where I gathered my friends just to snuggle and watch movies together. I also found time to travel down to Page One’s warehouse sale (only to grab a book by Tess Gerritsen, which I have always wanted to buy but never got to do so). Weekends were nothing special, but I took pleasure in taking outdoor strolls to the nearest cafe for breakfast, or to the market for brunch.

I barely set enough time for serious business and frankly, there was nothing to my new year resolution. I never gave much thought about that because to me it was just a transition from one year to another. Or maybe it was because I no longer have a new goal in mind. Setting new goals for yourself is indeed essential to being self-motivated constantly, but once again I have nothing to say about that for myself. My long-term goal, however, is to finally have my own place, but there is still a long, long way to go.

All of what I have been doing has almost nothing to do with design, and having been dealing with all that work these few months, I guess I really deserved that break. There isn’t a point in exhausting my mind and challenging myself to create better things if I am not even feeling rejuvenated. So one piece of advice to those of you who are feeling severely unmotivated about life and everything else – help yourself by going on a vacation.

And maybe I do have a new year resolution after all, which is to continue living in contentment.

Today we live in the revolutionary times which he had helped created, and I am pretty sure he had achieved everything that he had ever hoped for in his life – which was to change the way people live through design and experience.

With that, I end this post with another quote which I find extremely inspirational and meaningful, something that I believe relates to every single one of us out there in this world.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Image Source: BuzzFeed

Time and again, plans have been delayed for other things to be done. It used to be me sitting down in front of my computer, feeling extremely inspired and eager to complete whatever that I had in my mind. It was like a spark had ignited within me and my thoughts were like spreading like wildfire, plentiful of random ideas coming altogether. It was a wonderful feeling that I have lost touch with since a long time ago.

Now, the pace has slowed down drastically – I am constantly frowning upon the things I have done, questioning myself if they are ever good enough. I guess it is a little hard to let go when you have spent so much time working on the bits and pieces, eventually wondering if there will ever be an end point – or if you already have come to one.

Nowadays it is rare to come across an original piece of artwork. We are constantly inspired by the works of others and reassembling them into one of our own. It is easy to spot a design trend, but have you ever wondered where it originated from? Neither do I. It is too easy to replicate a style and call it your own after a few tweaks. This is where trouble comes in. Is it right to say that there is no identity to a piece of work that has been inspired by a trend? Website galleries are growing in abundance, and they are all decent to say the least, or even better – but somehow it seems like getting featured has become too easy a task.

One obvious trend that we have now is HTML5, and it is almost impossible to ignore unless you haven’t been using the net or keeping up with the times. I myself love HTML5 in particular. In fact I would no longer consider it a trend as it has evolved into a necessity with the growing demand for mobile compliant sites. And with this, a tonne of people are jumping on the bandwagon, including those who were never really interested in building actual sites. Want to build a slider? Sure, just grab a plugin from one of the gazillion featured across the net. Easy peasy. We do not need the experts here.

Well, it is true that anyone can easily build their own site nowadays, and unfortunately this has also caused a wide misconcept about web design. “If you’re a web designer, then you must know how to build one too.” Find this saying familiar? Anyone can be a web designer now. In fact, most people do not know the difference between web designer and web developer. Being a “web designer” simply means being able to build an entire site. To them, it does not make much of a difference anyway, because a web developer can produce an actual site and that is good enough. What about the web designers then? It seems to me that people no longer value the importance of web designing as much as developing the site itself.

It was always difficult for me to explain how a website works in layman terms, because of the technicality involved behind it. Apart from the fact that design is being exploited by people with the mindset of Photoshop empowers me to create whatever I want, there is also another misconception that a website can be achieved through Dreamweaver alone. I am not saying that it can’t be done, it is in fact plausible. But when it comes to dealing with a proper, actual site – it has to be carefully crafted.

First, the web designer crafts the mockups, defining the style and consistency. Then the front-end developer realises the mockups by slicing the images and optimizing them into W3C compliant sites (which means ensuring the site is displaying correctly across all browsers, which may involve unknown complications, and I would not want to digress about this considering the fact that we have IE). Finally the backend developer puts it altogether and programme to make it logical.

I’m not sure if any of you understood what I was trying to explain, but either way, being a web designer could be a tough job when you are expected to know how to build one besides designing it. Design alone is subjective enough, and it could take up most of your time and eat into the amount of time needed to build one. Although it is good for one to understand the fundamentals of web development, it is unfair to assume that all designers should know how to code.

I am not the expert here to be strongly opinionated about something, for I enjoy designing and doing front-end coding at the same time (no… I can’t fully develop any CMS-related websites or give good advices). It is actually easy to differentiate between a messy coding and a decent one, but no-one really cares because all ugly codes are hidden behind that beautiful piece of design. Human beings are very visual people. Only web developers would frown upon what goes behind it, and if only the rest cared, then would the world be a better place.

Sundays Aren’t Forever

No prizes for guessing, that is my new secondary blog dedicated to my dailylife photos. Frankly I do have a few blogs but I was always trying to figure out where would be a good place to post my photos. Thus my decision to create a new blog dedicated solely for that. Do follow me on bloglovin’ if you are a regular as well!

I will still continue to update interest/web-related articles and project-inspired stories over here, even if they may bore most of the people who are only interested in fancy photos or articles.

On a usual note, I have been busy with work, but I guess I have developed an interest for posting pictures on Instagram. To all the fellow Instagram users out there, my username is thebikiniboy.

And yes, as you may have noticed – I have switched my wordpress theme to the default. I am working on a revised portfolio page and it will more or less be close to what I have now, as I have grown tired of my site.

Pictures: 100layercake

If you were an active member of the Blogskins community back in 2008 and 2009, you would know that I was a regular user of the site, contributing templates every now and then, coming up with all sorts of ridiculous stuff which did not make much sense. How on earth did I even managed to design so many templates?

Honestly, I was so motivated to create all that funky crap that I didn’t even think it was abnormal to do so. I’ve had friends who came to me and asked, “how did you find all these time to do your own stuff?” To which I would reply, because there would always be free time to do something. I thought it was perfectly normal to do so.

Then BAM! All of a sudden I found myself being thrown onto the ground, just like how Odin banished Thor into mortal Earth. It hit me like how a shower of meteorites hit planet Earth in Armageddon, or how the sudden gusts of wind swept the ducklings away like pieces of paper… and whatever you can think of. Now my mind is officially stuck at Square One, in which later it goes to Square Two… but before it could ever hit the next square it would just return to Square One again. Oh well, I’ve said this a million times before, and it is just so difficult to break out of it.

Personal work is now progressing at snail speed, and I am worried that they would never see the light of the day. I have created a few blogskins which were never shared publicly, all tucked away into darkness. I’m sharing a lot of small adventurous ideas with a couple of friends now and then, hoping that we could work out something together, but in the end the conversations usually go nowhere and I would later sink into my chair and watch the days go by.

I am a lot into pastel and yummy colours lately, but at the same time, I am in love with wedding event decorations. So white and pure. That represents everything that I’d wish for now. Albeit the tonne of stuff on my mind, I am still searching for this peace. Now, back to work.

Bringing back to the question (in your head, if you did ask any), where do you find great tutorials? Tutsplus, of course. It is probably the holy grail for all web learners. Sure there are many other places to find great tutorials, but Tutsplus serves one well with their active contributions and up-to-date learning resources. Precisely why the reason I stopped coming up with my own tutorials because I feel crappy looking at them now.

On the other hand, I am still working. Of course I am… but that’s not a sad life, I have been working on some awesome stuff, the process is grueling, but it is the process that counts. I have consciously and subconsciously learned many things at work. Some days I feel good, some days maybe like shit, but hey, that’s work life. I don’t get to do super boring projects, since my boss is a big fan of ideas (which is something I am weak at, since I’d usually prefer to hide at a corner and create pretty stuff). Well, I’m still learning. Designers can’t make pretty things for life, do they? They have to make things that work.

Now bringing to the point of making things that work, there is a piece of good news… for me. I am working on some ideas. Some small ideas. Everything is WIP, maybe I have deserted one of the projects, but I am constantly trying to ignite that fire within me whenever I can. These projects are web-based, but because of my incapability to develop the backend, I can only present them on the surface. But it’s fun and I like doing it. I actually enjoy redesigning web interfaces. All that GUI and UIX stuff, you know… aha.

The last time I actually published a project similar to these is the redesign for Blogskins. To be honest, this is not fantastic – but it was pleasing to the eye and user-friendly. I enjoyed redesigning this because I was a user of the site, and I could feel how it feels like to really use this interface, and I know I would like it. Given the time and energy, I would have a second go at the redesigning process. It is never easy to feel satisfaction from a personal project… we are always tempted to redesign one thing over and over again. I would actually love to create a community if there are programmers keen to take on the idea, but unfortunately, I do not know anyone who is as enthusiastic to help me with this one.

I shall live my dreams inside my head, I guess.