Les Bonnes Choses

I know the title of this post could be misconstrued, but anyone who knows me will quickly put the alternative interpretation out of their minds, and know that I am making a reference to the men's fragrance, produced by Calvin Klein. Anyways, on to my point. I get fixated on some visual themes from time to time. Since OAC summer school biology, I have doodled hundreds of reflective spheres. A few years ago, it was the Celtic trinity knot. More recently, I have been contemplating doing up a proper website for myself, which naturally got me more sensitive to the look and feel of the websites that all the cool kids are doing these days. Things have come a long way since I last built websites using nested html tables. For the last two weeks, or so, I have been obsessed with drawing those web 2.0 glassy buttons. If you don't know what I'm talking about, think about the interface to any Apple product, and more recently, to the prettified Windows Vista. Many websites are using this look too. Notice how everything looks all nice and shiny, like the interface is supposed to be made of glass, or shiny plastic (why, just today, I saw a website that seemed to be borrowing heavily from the look of carbon fiber). Photoshop CS had a plugin for glass buttons, but it was crap. I should know, because I tried to make a glassy button for the feature norms website (you may follow the link if you wish, and fill out whatever knowledge you may have about some random objects -- use 00+your phone number as your 9-digit log in ID if you do). I recently found a tutorial for duplicating this effect in Photoshop, and more interestingly, in Illustrator, which is really cool because Illustrator can make fully scalable vector images. You probably aren't as thrilled about that as I am. Trust me, it's cool. Anyways, the extent of my obsession is such that this evening, I downloaded a vector drawing program called Inkscape just so I could drop some glossy circles. My withdrawal symptoms have abated, and my graphic can be found here.


Update for tagging purposes: If you go to the feature norm website, the voice you hear reading the instructions belongs to Amy. She has the best voice for reading instructions of anyone I know. Also for tagging purposes, I took that OAC biology class with Daan DeKerpel. We were "cheating bandits".