My talk on HTML5 at Ladies Learning Code

This past Saturday (September 24th) I had the pleasure of speaking to the 60 participants signed up for the Ladies Learning Code “HTML & CSS for beginners” workshop about the future of the web.

Ahh, whoops, that’s not the right picture, is it? Let’s try that again. The future of the web!

That’s better. In my lightning talk, I gave a very brief introduction to the awesomeness that is HTML5 (and its friends – most of these things wouldn’t happen without JavaScript, too!). It was fun seeing lots of people get excited about some of the new things they’ll soon be seeing in their browsers. Sadly I couldn’t cover even close to everything, but the advancements I talked about are among some of the most exciting, in my opinion.

If you’re interested (or are one of the attendees who asked for a copy), click here to download my slides (in PDF format).

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Posted in Web Design/Development |

Lately

Here are some photos from my summer (so far – it’s not over yet! Right?).

In more web-related news, I spent a lot of July working on the Toronto Kiss Map, an superfun interactive web app dreamed up by Chris Kay Fraser where people place kiss stories on a map of Toronto. This was definitely the most comprehensive project I’ve done to date, in that I did the design, front-end development, and programming. I’ve made a lot of websites before, but I’d never made anything quite so interactive (or JavaScript heavy, for that matter). It was definitely a challenge, but totally worthwhile. It also proves that you can use WordPress for almost everything these days – I routed all of the map submissions through WordPress and have them storing as comments (for ease of moderation and spam filtering). Totally not what WordPress was ever intended for originally, but there you go.

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Posted in Miscellaneous |

Playing with Portfolios

Tonight I’ve been messing around with Issuu, a sleek-looking PDF publishing tool (thanks for the recommendation, deevee!). I really like that you can flip through PDF documents as if they were 3D magazines. So, I quickly pulled together a small portfolio in InDesign, outputted it as a PDF, and uploaded it to Issuu. You can see the results below.

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Posted in Graphic Design |

Springtime Poster

Here is the latest addition to my ever-growing Printing Press concert poster series. I made the background using a photo I took of a magnolia tree during my excursion to High Park.

In conclusion, trees with pink flowers are awesome.

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Posted in Graphic Design |

Cherry Blossom Girl

Today I went to High Park for what is probably the last day of Toronto’s cherry blossom season. In other parts of the world, they bloom earlier and last a bit longer, but because of the climate here, our peak cherry blossom season only lasts for a few days to a week! Tomorrow calls for rain, which will probably wash most of the niceness away.

But hey, that’s why cameras were invented! And on that note, here are some of my own photos from today.

In conclusion, I’m excited that spring is finally here! I’ve been keeping busy these days with a few freelance web projects, as well as doing some graphic design. I just completed a fairly self-centered project: designing my own business cards. I can’t wait ’til they show up some time next week! I’ll post pictures once they arrive.

Notes:

• The collage above is made with my own pictures, using one of my favourite toys, Poladroid. I know I’ve mentioned Poladroid enough, but it’s so fun (and kitschy) that I can’t help myself.
• Post title is referencing the song — wait for it — Cherry Blossom Girl, by Air. Have a listen. It’s pretty.

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Posted in Photography |