A lot of teenagers, including myself, usually take the first job they come across, when they’re starting off. As soon as they do, it doesn’t take long for them to realize that they’re getting the short end of the stick, while their boss is taking in all the green bills.

This explains why service quality is so poor in most low-paying establishments, like in fast food restaurants.

A rule of thumb that a lot of people take is:

If I’m not going to get payed any extra money, why should I put in any extra effort?

It’s easy for any unmotivated person to follow that rule, and stick to what they have to do, instead of what they could. It makes sense for them to act in that manner, it’s the employee’s way of expressing his dissatisfaction with his position, it’s his way of thinking that he is getting back to his employer for paying him such a low amount of money.

Your employer couldn’t care less if your doing job properly or not

And this is something that everyone looking for a first, or a low paying job, should consider. Just like you showed up for the first interview, others will. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of people, ready to fill your shoes, and feel the same way you do now.

So now you’re probably thinking “Does this mean that I’m on a lose-lose situation?”

No, you’re not.

Your employer made a large investment, he put in an amount of money to start, or run the business that you will never be able to match with your earnings. He needs to make more money than you to keep the business running, he took the chance, risked his money, and created a job for you. He’s not a saint, he’s just someone trying to get by, as you are. The only difference is that he has more money to risk and invest, and you don’t.

If your working place is doing great, and making good revenues, your boss will most likely consider expanding. But he will need to gather trustworthy people in order to do that. That is where you might come in.

He’s not a saint, but he has everything on the line, while you have nothing. If your shop has to close down, you move to another job and start over. It’s not as easy for your boss as it is for you.

Not all contributions you can give to your job are money-related, but at the end of the day, it is money that keeps your job going or not. Unless your boss is cruel, and greedy, he will appreciate any extra effort you put in. Because all that effort does measure up at some point, and your company will feel that. You have to understand that it’s something that is not easily measurable.

If you work in a diner, and you take the extra time to help close down the shop, or clean the logo outside, your boss will appreciate it. But there’s no way he can account for it. He can’t witness your work and say “he cleaned the balcony when he didn’t have to, I’ll give him $5 extra in his pay check”.

Don’t look at your position as the one of a slave.

YOU are the customer.

You are the one looking for the right job, the right employee, the right colleagues. You can move on effortlessly, and leave your job behind, but your employer can’t do the same.

If you do happen to find a bad job, and you probably will, just make sure that when you leave it things are better than they were when you got in. That way they’ll feel the difference, and who knows, maybe your former boss will come to his senses and figure out how, or that he should have, accounted for void you left behind.

Take your time finding the proper job, don’t settle too soon if you don’t have to, and specially if you’re not satisfied with the job you got.

Some company bosses/managers might agree that the most important thing about a project that was agreed upon by both ends is the contract. This idea couldn’t possibly be any further away from the truth even if it tried.

In the same way that you might missinterpretate the ideas of a customer, he will also make his own presumptions about how the project should or will be carried out. Whether you are a manager, a programmer or a designer, you have to realize that your customer usually is not.

The Manager

If your customer conducts his business in a different way from yours that is normal, you don’t have to agree with it, you just have to follow the legal terms that were defined in the contract and define the borderline in the gray areas. Your sole job is not to only make the biggest profit possible, you have to listen to your customer’s demands and meet him halfway.

Public Relations / Designer

If your customer has a different taste from yours and finds your masterpiece design inadequate that is also normal, as the designer you are the person who has to “connect” to your customer the most, and understand his feelings and intentions.

Some customers already have a fixed idea of what their website should look like, if you present them with something that looks incredibly good, but is completely different from what he had in mind, he will be disapointed, even if your design was worthy of praise. Communication is the key here, and the designer, more than anyone else, should be the master of it.

The Programmer/Mechanic/”Labor force”

You are the “monkey”, the hamster running inside the wheel. You’re the last person to know anything about the customer. You hold the most unappreciated job because most of what you do isn’t palpable, visible or understandable by people who don’t realize what you do, yet, you are the one who makes it all happen.

If it weren’t for you the project wouldn’t be anything other than a nice idea, a great deal or a pretty picture.

You need to understand all of the work that was done before the project arrived. You need to know what the project is about, what it consists of, what was the budget, what leanway does the project have, what is the deadline, what are the customers tastes, what kind of person he is, what  kind of sites/products does he like.

If the Designer or the PR person is meant to be the master of communication, the programmer has to be the master of understanding.

You need to explain clearly to your manager what the work involves, how long you think it will take and share your opinion on how viable you think the project, or the tasks at hand, are.

You need to talk to the PR, who had to understand what kind of product the customer wants, how things should work. You also have to make the PR understand that some of their “brilliant ideas” might not always be the most viable in the project’s scope.

The Team

Needs to be coese, understanding, and aware of the weight of their words and actions. The more your team members try to understand each other’s tasks, the better it is for them to realize how each of their tasks work.

Every member should always take a minute out of every conversation with their colleague to explain what the task at hand consists of. Doing so will not only improve the overall quality of the projects, but it will also make the next projects easier, and most mistakes, or ill-given tasks will not reoccur.

With all these things said, you’d think that the most important aspect is a gathering of the points made above…

It isn’t.

The most important aspect of any project is “listening”.

You can have the best manager who understands the scope of the project, knows fundaments of design and how the project development process works, and manages to squeeze the biggest amount of profit from the project…

You can have the best PR person in the world, one who can dive into the minds of the customer and find out everything that the customer wants from the project and more…

You can have the best programmer/mechanic/engineer that ever walked this planet, who can turn dust into gold, and achieves goal in lightning-fast times…

… and it won’t matter a thing, if the customer doesn’t follow the project, or listens to what your team has to say to him.

When customers are participative, and understanding, all phases of any project run smoother. The team members will work harder, they will be more motivated and feel more relevant in their tasks. And the only reason they will be is because they were listened by him.

When your team members have a hard time acknowledging the value of each other, and what each of their tasks involve, a lot of discrepancies start to occur in the project’s requirements, and tasks will start falling behind schedule.

If you’re dealing with a particularly “hard” customer, or a team that has a hard time communicating, this is where your manager or team leader has to step in, take the reins, and be the voice of that “perfect customer” or “perfect colleague”, and explain to the team members each of their tasks, without neglecting any of their words or the importance of their tasks.

Having a customer that listens, and a team that listens to itself, can make all the difference between a bad to a mediocre or a mediocre to a great project.

Zero no Tsukaima, To Love Ru, Rosario Vampire are all good examples of what I meant by my previous statement. They all took a few of those ingredients, and they all made me lose the interest in them after a few episodes. Had it not been how tired I was at the time from watching good Animes with “complicated” storylines I probably wouldn’t have watched more than their first episode.

In the midst of those mediocre Animes, and in the middle of my boredom from watching some high-quality but slow-paced Animes, like Bouken no Xamdou (which I definitely recommend) a friend of mine lent me Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which I’ll call Gurren Lagann from here on. His description of the anime was more or less the recipe I gave in the first paragraph. I thought to myself “well, as long as it’s very lively it will probably be more entertaining than the other Animes I tried”.

With these low expectations in mind, Gurren Lagann came out to be surprisingly good. Despite having a very straightforward storyline, it showed excelent character development, a surprisingly “mature” story which was anything but funny many times, and never showed me a dull moment thanks to it’s clever funny scenes or the well animated fighting sequences.

The following paragraph will have a few spoilers, so jump to the end of the article if you do not want to see them.

I have to admit that it was when one of the main characters died that the anime grabbed my utmost attention. Until then it only seemed to be like any other “cliché” anime that came before it. From that point onwards, the story spiralled into a much darker, mature setting, without losing any of the things that kept me entertained before that.

Gurren Lagann borrows heavilly from many Animes that came before it and failed miserably, and it had more than enough oportunities to become one of them, and it never did.

It didn’t have the “happy” colorful storyline I thought it would, it didn’t have a happy ending like one would expect, and it provided all of the characters with excellent character development (except, of course, for the comedy relief ones) and it taught a very valuable lesson that many shonen (action) Animes fail to give: strong will and power isn’t enough to achieve anything.

I definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys Anime. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is, to me, a modern classic.

Sometimes the amount of tasks we take during our days make some hobbies seem less worthwhile. But what is the point on living in a globally connected network if I am not to share my words and thoughts.

Not blogging has made me lazy.

Some people have or lack the motivation to find and discuss their topics of interest without anyone calling out  to them. I had the privilege of belonging to one of the very best networks in the web, had great friends who’d read and discuss my articles.

Since I quit writing on ForeverGeek and this blog I’ve been less keen on keeping up to date with the latest news, and instead of feeling like someone else would fill that void for me, I found out that no one does. None of my friends would bring up the subject of a brand new product or platform they found, unless our conversation happened to lead to it.

Perhaps that makes life more interesting, more random, but it also kept me and my friends from finding out about great things sooner, rather than later. Now that I think about it, with the exception of the posts I wrote for ForeverGeek, I didn’t use to share many news on this site unless it was a subject I was very excited about.

With that “restriction” torn away, I’m now free to write about whatever I want, technology included. Don’t call this a comeback, it’s simply a return to my roots, and the continuation of something I enjoy doing.

1. One USB port - I didn’t buy the “Macbook Air is your entry to the wireless world”. I find the wireless features included very nice and thoughtful. But one USB is just too little by today’s standards. If you want to make use of the port for anything other than a computer mouse, you’ll be “forced” to purchase the wireless Mighty Mouse, which is a fine mouse really… but I’d rather have choice.
2. External Adapter for Ethernet - In Apple’s attempt to thread the line between being very light and convenient, and cute but useless, they decided to not include an ethernet port, but created instead a USB ethernet port. Despite having the option for an Ethernet cable, the one USB port once again diminishes your options.
3. The Price - I have to be honest. Considering that this is an incredibly thin and light laptop, I find the price acceptable. But considering the device’s specifications, I don’t see that many reasons to pick one of these up, rather than a “normal” Macbook, which will leave you with a bigger harddrive, an Optical Drive, a faster processor, and so on. As small and light as it may be, you will get a much better bang for your buck with a Macbook. 
4. The Keyboard - although it’s boasted as one of the positive features, I find that the color picked for the keys feels wrong. Despite loving the layout and the touch-and-feel of Macbook keyboards, I think this color combination would have worked much better if they had made the aluminum black, or darker.

Not everything is bad though. What Apple managed to fit inside such a small device is amazing:

1. LED LCD, High Quality Webcam, Core 2 Duo processor and X3100 graphics card - You cannot find these specifications in such a small (or similarly small) laptop for less than $2000. They wanted to rival Sony’s incredibly sexy TZ series. They accomplished that, and then some.
2. The very first “Green” laptop. Although not many consumers have deep concerns for environmental issues, it’s nice to see Apple sticking by their words and maintaining their devices as eco-friendly as possible.
3. The laptop comes with Micro DVI to DVI/VGA adapters in the box. Not the most expensive components you’d need, but it’s still a nice touch.

Bottom line: For me the Macbook Air is a slightly smaller and slightly gimped Macbook. For the same price I’d rather purchase a Macbook with an upgrade or two or save a bit more and get it’s aluminum big brother.  

Things aren’t going too well between me and my father, perhaps because we spend too much of our time together, perhaps because of the age gap between us. Regardless of the reasons, things between us were deteriorating quickly, so rather than let them get too far, I decided to move out, hoping that the change would do us both good.

Ironically, the blog that made me kick off my “career” as a blogger was recently sold for the second time to Splashpress Media and they decided that rather than keeping the editors, they’d use their own. So I’m out of a blogging job right now, but hopefully not for long.

David Peralty has been great with me, and instantly tried to hook me up with some of his contacts looking for quality editors for their websites. Whereas most would simply turn their back to me and wish me well, he went the extra mile. So when you read this David, I just want you to know that I really appreciate all of your help and care, and I’m sorry if I haven’t sound resoundingly happy these past few days.

In a way, I’ve been down for these last few days because I had to leave the house where I was brought up at, and the blog that nurtured me into a decent writer. On the other hand, I sort of feel relieved because perhaps this move will give me the strength I need for when I move to the UK.

Hopefully, from Tuesday onwards I’ll be able to resume work on the redesign when the cable company installs broadband at my mother’s apartment, and I’ll resume blogging here as usual. So I’ll see you next Tuesday readers, and thank you for your comprehension.

• the story revolves around a mysterious religion
• the hero pilots a giant “God” and fights against other God-like creatures
• the plot revolves around a small city with a powerful defensive military structure

In fact, most die-hard Evangelion fans will probably feel somewhat “offended” by all the direct references to their lovable Anime that they’ll probably forsake this one, and miss out on a great story, and one that they would surely enjoy.

One of the things that made Evangelion so bad and great, at the same time, were it’s plot holes. There are so many unanswered questions that one can speculate on any of them and drive the story in an entirely different direction. And that explains why it has such a huge following of fans, who write their own versions of the story and keep it fresh, even after all these years.

In RahXephon, you won’t find many plot holes. Sure, one may speculate about the emergence of the Mulians, which are the “enemies” of this story, or about the possible relationships or love interests between the various characters in the story, but all in all, RahXephon has an ending. A complex one, similar to the one seen in “The End of Evangelion”, but a good ending nonetheless.

If you do not wish to be spoiled of any part of the story, please refrain from reading the following paragraphs and skip to the conclusion.

The story starts off with a young high school student, Ayato Kamina, who discovers that the world as he knows it might not be as he seems. While he lives under the illusion that he is on an island, secluded from the rest of the world, and it’s inhabitants are the only living people on earth, it appears that the truth is far from being so, and after a short while he discovers that he has a destiny to fulfill, although he doesn’t know it yet.

With the aid of a mysterious girl, and a special operative, Ayato discovers a giant egg in which a God-like creature called Rah slumbers, and awakens it. Confused and scared inside the Rah, Ayato escapes from his hometown, and then discovers that he had been living on an alternative dimension secluded from the rest of the world, though that dimension was limited to just his home town: Tokyo.

After returning to the special operative’s base, he is asked to pilot the Rah in order to protect humanity from the attacks of the Mulians, and Ayato goes into an inner struggle where he must fight against the people who raised him. To further increase his indecisive mind, he begins to grow attached to the special operative who had rescued him, and begins to appreciate some simple pleasures, like watching a cargo ship set sail, which is something he couldn’t see where he lived in.

A lot of episodes feel like a normal Shonen: a new enemy arrives, the pilot rushes out to fight him, defeats it and comes back. But like in Evangelion, the main character sometimes has inner struggles, and a lot of events around him make him battle with himself. As the plot thickens, we learn about the past of all relevant characters and all of the relationships between them, and at the end, Ayato is faced with his biggest challenge, and sacrifices his human form in order to protect those he loves.

Fortunately, at the end, rather than being, or feeling, unclear, like in the “End of Evangelion”, we see him living a normal life with his loved one, and then we see a flashback that answers that most revolving question throughout the show, that is: who is the yellow dress girl?

Conclusion: Although some might accuse it of stealing some elements from Evangelion, I don’t think that it’s that similar. The story is much more romantic than Evangelion, and explores human relationships much more, while Evangelion simply focuses on religion and the human psyche.

It succeeds as an action story, for all the battles, and the animation, are great. It succeeds as a love story, for there are a few love triangles, love interests, and special interests between most of the characters, even the secondary ones. It succeeds in it’s soundtrack, which is reminiscent of Evangelion’s excellent orchestrated pieces.

Last but not least, it succeeds as a great Anime in general. Surely you won’t need to watch the show two or three times to grasp most of the story, but if you disliked the way Evangelion left many of the story elements hanging, then you’ll love RahXephon.

If you’ve followed the 2 most popular God Anime shows, Death Note and Code Geass, Double-O Gundam is the obvious choice for those who enjoyed the genre.

The story kicks off with a young boy, who we guess is the main character of the show in the middle of a battlefield, carrying a machine gun and running away and shooting at giant mechs killing everyone in the ruined city. A scenery very similar to the one found in Metal Gear Solid 4.

Rather than describing the rest of the two episodes, I’d rather just tell you what I thought of them. I think this Gundam got off to a good start. It has a nice, and rather calm, song for it’s intro and an ending that is well, a bit weird, for the theme of the Anime.

The character design is great, although one of the characters from the main team looks like a girl, in fact, if he was mute I’d say he was a girl, although I still have my doubts. The other characters seem a bit generic, though well suited to the type of Gundams they pilot. Oh! There’s a character called Hallelujah Baptism… I kid you not. And the name of the organization that our heroes belong to is called Celestial Being, and their aim is to bring “holy judgment” upon those who wage war. That’s where the “God theme” comes from.

The team consists mostly of teenagers, and the leader is a red-head woman (though she looks like a teenager) with very voluptuous curves. Personally I think that the show got off on a good start and has managed to bring something new to the franchise without losing some of the characteristics of it’s predecessors. You can expect me to follow this show on the blog as often as I watch it.

Although it’s practically impossible to get it to render exactly the same due to some small differences, it’s rendering well enough for me to consider it done. From here on, till the end of the conversion it should be a breeze.

You can check out the header here.

But it pains me to see that not only do we have to have the support of friends, to join the front page, but also the approval of the “Bury Brigade”, which is the name that Digg users, and bloggers alike, have given to the tight circle of Diggers who seem to enjoy burying the topics that don’t suit their tastes, rather than promoting new types of articles, which don’t appear very often, but instantly gain their disapproval because they don’t feature half-naked women using Apple products.

I don’t frequent Digg as I used to, but back when I used it frequently, rather than just “leeching” off information from the website, I also participated and looked for upcoming articles. This became more frequent as the quality of the front page articles deteriorated, and right now it’s simply reached a state where all of the front page articles are predictable and repetitive.

It’s very simple to get your article on the front page, just get a few dozen friends to Digg your article in a short period of time and you’re there (yes, I am aware that they changed their algorithm not too long ago so it would take more Diggs to reach the front page).

Back when I used Digg, reaching the front page was the hard part, and from there onwards, people would only Digg it more, and you’d gain your few minutes/hours of “fame” (or more appropriately, traffic). Today, your article has to gain the support of your friends or Digg-buddies, and the approval of the Bury Brigade, who instead of promoting quality content “bury” any content that doesn’t fit the “trend” of articles that we see today.

After going to Digg’s front page right now and having a quick look at what their Top Technology Articles are, here are some of the things you must have in your article to gain the Bury Brigade’s approval:

• The words “Apple”, “Mac” or “iPod/iPhone” - that’s all there is to it, write an article about whether you love or hate any Apple-related thing and that’s halfway-done to Digg stardom
• A gorgeous woman using/licking/covered with a random sexy gadget (preferably an Apple product) - do I need to explain this one?
• [Insert Random Number Here] ways to do [Insert Random Tech Related Thing here] - if I named this article “10 things I hate about Digg’s Bury Brigade”, you would have come across this article from Digg’s front page
• Photoshop/Design Tutorial/How To/”No No” or “Yes Yes” lists - a lot of people who use Digg think that web usability or good design can be learned by following a checklist or an iPhone Button Photoshop tutorial
• Linux is Good / Microsoft is bad - even though most Digg users probably use Windows, anything that can convince them of how good Ubuntu is, or how you can change your wallpaper on it, AND how much better you can change your wallpaper on Ubuntu than on Windows, is definitely an instant front-page article. (ok, maybe I emphasized the sarcasm a little too much there, but you get the picture)
• Funny chain-letter-esque images - I’m all for humor. In fact, I consider myself a humorous person. But when funny 404 pages are incredibly more relevant as tech news that an article that questions Mint.com’s security, you should realize that front page on Digg doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s more relevant or a more accurate response to what are the latest tech news or articles.

Right now, the Digg front page only lists those articles that are more popular between a small group of people and approved by the large majority of them which bury any article that doesn’t suit their tastes.

But if you follow the list above you can guarantee that your articles will suit the Digg-groupies tastes. Just don’t expect on it suiting the tastes of the “rest of us” who abandoned Digg for the “selection” of articles above.

Personal Note: Although I listed it as one of the negative items, I have to admit that I happen to visit Macenstein once a month to see their Mac girl of the month. I know that most of them are just models pretending to be Mac fans, but the illusion that somewhere in the world a girl like that exists pleases my inner-geek.

I caught up with the articles I owed ForeverGeek and with the industry news in general. For the first time in days I took time to read some of my favorite comic strips like Dilbert and Pearls Before Swine, which I religiously follow.

So no, I’m not slacking off, and you can expect a lot of updates tomorrow. Now back to your regularly-scheduled program…

When I was talking with my good friend David today a thought hit me: if it weren’t for a handful of people I wouldn’t be writing this article today.

There were a lot of people who inspired or motivated me to start a blog (no, I didn’t just make it to randomly rant or talk about personal things “no one cares about”), and I thought it was about time to give them the recognition they deserve for that.

A couple of people have gone as far as to call me a “successful” blogger. Although that idea always makes me chuckle, when I consider that I am both payed for some of my articles and that I somehow managed to become a member of 9rules (a fact that amazes me until this day), I can’t say that I’m an unfortunate blogger, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

A series of curious coincidences led me to start blogging, thanks to the offer by a man, and later on that man was once again influential in what would or not become my blogging career. And had it not been for his acceptance, I might have not given this blog half of the love that it’s received (although it deserves much more, specially as a part of such a prestigious network).

That man was none other than Paul Scrivens, best known as Scrivs who is the brainchild behind the popular 9rules network and a few other popular blogs like the Whitespace, Wisdump (which was sold to splashpress media), and the very popular podcast: Scrivs Tyme.

It all started when one of the blogs I used to read was looking for new editors. As I sat in my office chair thinking about the offer and how cool it would be to write the articles that other tech-enthusiasts such as myself would read, my two co-workers, Xavier and André, both motivated me to give them an e-mail, and so I did.

At the time, ForeverGeek was owned by Scrivs. When I first started I was incredibly “clumsy” as an editor. I wrote some of the most commented, but also the most controversial, articles where I bashed or favored some company’s product. Some of the other editors, who were closer to Scrivs suggested that he’d kick me out. Until this day I don’t know why he didn’t.

A few months later, ForeverGeek was sold, and under the new ownership I started being payed a fixed amount of money. That was the first time I felt like a professional, and thus I started taking blogging much more seriously, until the point I opened my own blog, which you are reading right now.

During this blog’s early days, as you may confirm with the archive, it had little or no direction. I wrote about whatever I felt like, or whatever was having an impact or influence in my lifestyle.

At first I thought it could serve for me to comment on the newest gadgets I found appealing. Then I found out, through various comments on ForeverGeek, that the readers liked to be informed about new things as much as they enjoyed reading the editor’s opinions about them. This lead to a natural enrichment of my ForeverGeek articles, and a slight disregard towards this blog which started serving as nothing more than an outdated journal and a repository for my CV and Portfolio.

Then I met David Peralty, who I mentioned at the start. At the time he was just another editor like myself at ForeverGeek, but he had higher ambitions than I: he was attempting to make a living from blogging. Until this day, he still does, and I must commend him for that because it takes a lot of courage for a person to consider such a thing.

It didn’t take long for us to become friends, and before I knew it we were both reading each other’s blogs, and once again I felt motivated to write here again. So if you enjoy reading this blog, the kudos should go to him, and not me.

Then came 9rules…

Back in the day I joined 9rules, most people considered the network the epitome of blogging, the best of the best, the “little black book”. Although it evolved into more accessible social website, I am certain that regardless of which member site I visit on 9rules, the content there will be great.

But the best thing about 9rules’ evolution is that people no longer have to look upon 9rules members as distant “Gods of Blogging “who would look down on you from their Olympia. Now anyone can and should interact with us through 9rules’ notes, messages, or with any of the other new things that they’re bringing out with their upcoming Ali2 version the site (which will be launched on Monday).

Now that I’ve done the blatant network promotion on with the story… David (he pops up a lot in this story) convinced me that my blog was good enough to join 9rules, and that I should try to get in. I’m not sure what name I called him at the time, but I’m certain that it was something in the line of “insane”. Insanely enough, I got in. I don’t know if Scrivs favored me a little, or if Tyme thought I looked cute enough…

…all I know was that I was in. And that was the happiest day I ever had since I started blogging. Yes, my ego went up 300% for the first couple of weeks, but after that it went back to normal, and I started focusing again on bringing quality content.

(Oh my, it’s 3am already so I should think about ending this article)

Anyway, if you were paying a lot of attention to this article (although you shouldn’t really), you’d know that I mentioned that a handful of people influenced me enough to start blogging. Who would the mysterious 5th person be?

Well, unfortunately he doesn’t have a blog (he’s not that tech-savvy yet), but I can guarantee that he is a great professional in published media. He’s none other than my father, who was the Editor in Chief of my island’s most sold newspaper for many years. Thanks to him I’ve always felt attracted to publishing and writing my own articles, and this is something he has influenced me to do all of my life.

So it gives me great pride to follow his legacy on the blogging sphere, and who knows, maybe someday I’ll be half as good as he is.

You can visit the live design blog by going to http://thewhitehawk.com/live and comment or test it out.

Sure, there are hundreds of 3 column CSS layouts on the web, but to find one where I could easily adapt to my site’s dimensions (Stu Nicholl’s was too hard to do that). Thankfully, after many attempts, including some of my own. I found a layout I could adapt to my design and change easily by using Layout-o-matic.

My time to work on converting the theme was very short, because I had to attend on my best friend’s birthday party. But! I had enough time find a good layout, and adapt it’s dimensions to the ones I needed.  As I type this right now, it’s 4am, and I am slowly converting it to a wordpress theme.

You can see the “raw” layout by clicking here.

So during the next few days (hopefully they won’t be many) when you visit this site you will see it flourishing into what will eventually become my best achievement in web design yet.

Such a task is not an easy thing to accomplish, and in the midst of the rush to make it look as nice as possible, in the shortest amount of time, it is very likely for me to forget some basic rules or to make some dire mistakes which I normally wouldn’t make.

That is why I will have the help and the commentaries of a few friends, colleagues and acquaintances. All of them will be lending me their eyes and words, and help me keep the progress in line (and pull my ears if I take too long to do something).

So far the three people who will be helping me out are my dear friend, and co-worker at BloggyNetwork: David Peralty; the incredibly talented and nice Elena from DesignDisease (who designed all of the sites in the BloggyNetwork); and my very intelligent friend and former-colleague from college, David Gouveia.

If I’m lucky enough, I might even trick a few of the 9rules members into giving me their opinions also, but only time will tell. So by this time tomorrow, or a bit later (you never know in this business…), you will start seeing new things in the site, or at least it’s main structure.

Changing web hosts is never a pleasant experience, which is why I tried to choose one host that has a lot of positive feedback, rather than going for the best value choice.

In case anyone is wandering, the site is currently hosted by Total Choice Hosting. In terms of hosting, or downtime, I have no complains. But I was screwed over last year when they asked me to pay a large sum of money for my .net domain because I had supposedly missed the payment, although I simply didn’t receive an invoice to do so.

Why didn’t I receive an invoice? It happens that we have to pay the domain in a separate part of their site, despite it being shown on the platform from which I payed the hosting (that platform had the invoice for the first purchase of the domain), and despite asking why I hadn’t received an invoice on the said platform and being told that I would receive it soon.

I still consider it a good host, and they have good value for their packages, and have always responded to my support tickets relatively quickly. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but this is the sort of person I am. When it comes to something I’m paying for I am: Fool me once, shame on you, and no, I’m not sticking around for “fool me twice”.

After watching 47 episodes of Nana, in only three days, I’m certain that it marked me far more than any other Anime previously did. I greatly enjoyed Honey and Clover, it’s a well thought Anime. I also enjoyed Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien more than any other. But those two stories are somewhat distant from the real world. Although the things that afflict them are real, the situation that the cast is in is simply unconventional, and there’s this haze of fiction around it. Nana has none of it.

The characters are all flawed, in one way or another. They all deal with their issues in their own manners. They are all different, yet, they’re also incredibly similar in some ways.

If you’re looking for a sugar-coated love story, you’ll find none of that here, although the first episodes might misslead you to think so.

The show is about two girls, with the same first name (I’ll let you guess what that name is). The dream of the first one, who is nicknamed “Hachiko”, is simply to find happiness and become independent. The second one, is much more ambitious, and aims to become a famous singer with her hometown punk-rock group.

Although they don’t acknowledge it at first, the times that they spend together become the happiest in their lives. But fate eventually takes it’s toll, and destiny drives them apart from each other. Despite being separated, I love how they always silently talk to each other during the beginning and ending of each episode.

Usually every episode will start with “Hey Nana…” followed by a thought about the past, or with a rhetorical question on how to make a decision.

The music in the story is simply perfect. There are many dramatic moments during the story, and although one of the characters is very emotional and sensible, the music that accompanies the scene is always incredibly adequate. It’s great to see the difference between the style of their music, and their personalities. The contrast is almost as good as Black and White.

An interesting thought came across while I was writing this review: Who should watch Nana?

And after giving it a bit of thought, I realized that everyone should watch it. Even if they don’t like Anime. The story puts all soap operas, and even great American series to shame. Young teenagers and grownups alike could certainly enjoy this story, and learn something from it. Specially older people that sometimes have trouble understanding what’s going through a young person’s mind.

In any case, I’ve said enough. If there’s one Anime I’d recommend anyone and everyone to watch, Nana would be it. And yes, I loved it that much.

Social networking has never been as big as it is now, and most people I know, even the less tech-savvy, have an account on at least one of those websites, and most of them keep track of the events in their lives through a chronological order. Blogging has been completely molded into those sites, and although some might claim that they never owned a blog, they may just be blogging unaware.

But what about professional blogging?

Sixteen years ago, and for 30 years before that, my father was the editor of the most popular local newspaper here in Madeira. The payments were low, the hours he put in were long (at the very least, 12 hours a day), and what kept him going the most was really the love for the profession. Is professional blogging today very different from this?

Today, most newspapers manage to succeed, whether they are printing or showing their articles online, there have never been as many journalistic sources for news as there are now. And the money that the journalists, and editors, earn, is actually quite a lot, compared to what it was a couple of decades ago.

Let’s look at professional blogging today. Despite the reports of 6 figure earnings, like those of ProBlogger.net’s Darren Rowse, not everyone is as sucessful as he is, in monetary terms. To give you a small idea, some editors may earn, some professional bloggers get payed less than $5 per article.

To write an article, you can waste as much as time time as a whole hour looking for the most accurate report, or something “worthy” of being posted on the website. But sometimes it can also be as quick as 15 or 30 minutes. But how many of these would you need to write in order to earn a good payment, enough to make a living?

Crunching the numbers…

Let’s see, imagine you can write 8 articles per day, one or two of which have to be product analysis ones. If you’re being payed 5$ per article, which is already considered a “great” payment in the blogging industry, you’d be able to earn $800 a month. Although you can write many more articles than that per day, you can only so many decent articles per an hour.

If your employer has high standards, the best you’ll be able to come with is around 6 articles in 8 hours, which would be complete product analysis, and probably earn you twice as much as a normal article would. Even so, the monthly wage you’d receive would still be very close to that of the minimum wage.

It’s not uncommon for professional bloggers, who live solemly from their blogging earnings to work over 12 hours per day, which is how long my father worked for two decades ago in journalism, and he earned quite more than the minimum wage, although it was nowhere as good as what the earnings are today (in journalism).

And don’t forget that there isn’t any “clear” way to declare your earnings for tax payment. The best thing you can do is to setup your own company for computer services, and use the earnings from that to declare your taxes.

The blogging industry is indeed blooming, and more professionals emerge each month. But I don’t think that we can call this the “golden” age yet. Right now only those with a nack for business, or a great love for blogging should consider taking it up as a professional career.

I recently purchased two new Web Design Index books, that called “Web Design Index” (very original name) from the Peppin Press which feature a nice selections of websites organized by different categories.

If I were to choose the websites for a book of this sort, I would be much more selective. Some of the designs chosen, are indeed original, in terms of layout and overall look, but most of them also sacrifice having a proper structure entirely.

I have absolutely nothing against being artistic with your website. But with some of the designs I’ve seen on this book there are several basic interface rules that are broken:

The structure changes almost entirely between the different sections.
Some websites have numbers representing the different pages of the website, with no other identification other than the address.
Other have really big and nice wallpapers, and all of the content is jammed inside a tinny semi-transparent box with “scroll buttons”.

I’m not by far the best web designer in the world, nor am I even close to that. But I would never sacrifice a good structure, that helped the user interact better with a website for a difficult or unconventional one for the sake of style alone. Unless the single purpose of your website is to entertain the visitor visually.

There are exceptions, like 2advanced studio’s website. The layout is a bit unconventional, although it’s somewhat structured, but the aim of the site is to visually appeal visitors and to demonstrate the kind of services that they can provide.

If you can design a site that is as visually appealing as theirs, then yes, you can sacrifice the structure a little bit for the sake of a good visual appeal. But as I mentioned before, they are an exception.

How far can I change the structure without making the website a maze to navigate?

Well, I think that a picture, on in this case a website, is worth a thousand words.

The link above directs you to Wolfgang Bartelme’s website.

On the front page you will have the beginning of the latest article, and just below, a few links to the articles before it. When you click on an article’s title, you will notice that the whole structure below the banner changes, and that was one of the bad things I mentioned about some design focused sites.

So why does it “work” in Bartelme’s site?

I never thought I’d ever quote myself, but if you ever read that long text in the index page of my website, you will find this on the first paragraph:

When you first arrive to an unknown site, even if you don’t notice, you will always ask yourself four questions: Who? What? Why? and How? and the text that follows this is precisely the answer for each of those questions.

Let’s look at this Bartelme article, as an example.

Do we know whose website it is? Yes, we do.

Do we know what the website is about? We immediately think that the website is about Design, and it is. Even though it doesn’t have an explanatory tagline, like the one I have, the content of the site becomes evident almost immediately.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Even though the “body” of the site changes depending on the section, the most important part, which is the navigation, and the header (in the case of this particular design), remains the same. You can always identify where you are and easily return to where you were.

Certainly, there ways to make the website better, in terms of navigation. But for a website with such simplicity, it isn’t necessary unless it starts to grow beyond it’s boundaries and becomes more complex.

When I made this website, I didn’t really consider whether such elements were necessary, and when I look back at it now, I could easily remove 80% of the links that clutter the site. That is why the redesign will have such a fresh and simple look, compared to the current look of the website.

How can you prevent making your website as cluttered as this one?

Think about your target audience, and what your needs will be. For a website like mine, with only 4 pages (which will be reduced to three), you don’t need to make it very complex. In fact, with such a small number of pages, you are given more liberty in how you can give your visitor the information he needs.

Honey and Clover was an Anime that marked me deeply, and make me think a bit more about my future. But there was never an Anime, movie or story that scarred me (yes, scar) as much as this one: Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien (The Eternity you desire).

It starts off as any other romantic Anime show with teenagers. And then things go horribly wrong, and we are driven into the middle of the most painful dilemas and grow to love and hate all of the characters, for various reasons.

This show had all the reasons to go wrong. It was based on an adult video game, that should have been reason enough. Instead, this show had a storyline so great that even some people I know, who had never touched Anime, not even with a long stick, watched it until the end, as fast as they could, and loved every second of it.

This is also, by far, the most depressing story I have ever seen. The characters aren’t immaculate, saints, or just pure evil. They are normal people, like you and me, who happen to be in the middle of a very difficult situation and they deal with it in the best and worst ways they can.

I guess you could call it a dramatic masterpiece. Which is why I’ll probably never watch this Anime again, unless I’m certain I can cope with all of the emotions that go through the story.

I live in two homes at the moment, my father’s where I have my “office” and where I usually do all computer-related tasks, and my mother’s apartment which is sort of like a weekend resort where I can just sit back and relax without the drudgery of the internet life.

Even though I enjoy being here, my hectic schedule, and the lack of an internet connection have sometimes come between what I need and want to do, but today, I surprisingly came across a slightly weak signal for a wireless network and managed to connect to it.

Despite being happy, after establishing an internet connection the first thing I did was to see if I could detect the owner’s computer, and if he was protected. My first concern was to alert him. Unfortunately, he isn’t, so there doesn’t seem to be anything that can stop me from using this privilege as much as I like. So should I?

No.

I hate to use such a corny quote such as this one that has been repeated half a dozen time in the Spiderman movies, but “with great power comes great responsibility”. When I told a friend of mine about my “discovery”, the first thing he told me was that I shouldn’t download too many things, because the owner might have limited traffic (in Portugal, most of the ISPs have very limited download limits).

If you’re relatively tech-savvy, going to any website that tests your connection, like SpeedTest.net, will give you an idea of how good the connection is. Thankfully, I have determined that this connection is one of the more expensive ones, so there’s plenty of bandwidth and unlimited traffic.

Being aware of this fact, should I take the opportunity to download things via P2P? That depends on whether the owner is using the connection or not. A quick trip to Microsoft Network will usually tell you if there are any other computers connected.

Should I alert the owner? Definitely. But right now it’s 2am, so I’ll do it tomorrow if he’s at home. How can I detect where the Wifi is coming from? Well, basically I just have to do a small trip with my laptop turned on and check when the signal gets strong or weak. I should be able to easily determine the floor, and I already know on which side of the apartment the router is on.

A lot of people avoid wireless networks, and technology altogether because they are badly informed or don’t bother reading the manual to properly protect themselves. While some could seize this oportunity to abuse the connection as much as they can. I will use it to help the owner, and “save him” from future problems with less mature people.

Being in an island that works with a lot of international groups, where many Brittish people come to live in, certainly gives me an advantage. And my friends and family have been quite supportive so far. Also, thanks to my father’s involvement with the Rotary club international I may even be able to get some support from UK members.

I feel sad about leaving my friends and my family behind. But I also feel excited, nervous and motivated to start off on a new career and explore a world which is completely different from this small, secluded and peaceful island.

On the bright side of things, I’ll be closer to many more international companies, with a lot of opportunities to develop my skills and to earn a better payment. I have been looking at many job offers, and I’m happy to say that my CV can fit most of them, even the most demanding ones.

This also means that Design Journal will return, and thus I will start transforming the design you’ve been seeing during the past months into transitional XHTML and CSS. As for Anime, I’ve been watching a few here and there, but for the time being, I must focus on my future and on my skills, so don’t expect much Anime content in the near future.

There’s nothing worse than forcing a person into being with you. That is something that has always worried and plagued me, for as long as I’ve lived. It’s funny how you feel, after all of the goals that you set disappear, because your relationship ended. Surely, other people go through harsher hardships. Some relationships leave emotional scars, or babies to rise. I can’t say I’ve experienced the later so much, although I can understand, or at least relate to it a bit. But I can certainly relate to the first.

You can’t help but to compare yourself to the one who replaced you. People who’ve seen her, with him, tell me that they have no idea what she sees in him, compared to me. I know that some people will say anything they can, just to make the other feel happier, but I can’t admit that I don’t think about it myself. I don’t look at him as someone inferior, just someone fortunate to have seized the moment, but perhaps unfortunate when the future rises.

It’s funny that all of the things that we promised to each other: honesty, regardless of the consequences, friendship, even if we became separated; all seem to break as easily as the words came out of our mouths at that time. It’s funny how all the moments, the pictures, the love we shared, the love we made, the things we cherished, the people we were with, all disappear, and turn into nothingness, when compared to the pain of losing one another.

I hope that no one else ever comes to know this pain, no one else but her. What goes around, comes around. I have to believe that, or else I’ll lose my sanity. And right now, it’s the only thing I have left to lose. Everything else feels empty and meaningless.

This latest song has a nice upbeat to it and would make a very nice Anime intro for some random shonen one. It’s a bit similar to her “Rolling Star” song, but I honestly prefer this one because it’s easier to listen to, and “Rolling Star” has some high pitched tones.

The second song on the single is a nice balad, which contrasts quite a lot with the first one. A few of my favorite YUI tracks are usually the “secondary” single tracks, and this one is no different. For those that are curious, those favorites are: “Winter hot music” and “Why me”, and I’m also a fan of “Blue Wind” from her first album.

The episode begins with young Clare (from the past), walking down a street holding Teresa’s head, after the man from the organization, to ask him to make her a Claymore, and to blend her body with Teresa’s. When we return to the present, we find Clare joining a team of 3 to battle against an Awakened.

Under the leadership of Miria, ranked as the 6th strongest Claymore in the organization, and two others, Helen (#22 in the rank), Deneve (#15). But what’s really surprising is that Clare’s rank is #47, meaning that, supposedly, she is the weakest Claymore of all. Even though her body has parts of the former #1, Teresa.

After leaving their rendezvous point, they move towards their location and choose a place to camp. Miria then decides to test Clare’s skills, by challenging her to a spar. Obviously, Clare is quickly defeated, and even mocked by her two other partners. But Miria, the leader, still things that there is an undiscovered strength in Clare, that she hasn’t even discovered yet.

When the group moves out, and approaches the location, they are met by a young man, who then turns into the Awakened one, and the whole party is surprised by the fact that a man can reach that state.

Even though the story isn’t very cryptic, it’s very enjoyable to watch, and although it’s an action show, somehow there are some elements that make it unique. In some ways, it reminds me of Berserk, but on the other hand, this story feels more realistic than that. And I remind you readers that I’m talking about a story with women that carry huge claymores and slay demons.

Next week, will continue this small arc, with the second part of the Slashers, and hopefully we’ll be able to witness a bit more of Clare’s potential.

As you have probably already noticed, I haven’t made any Design Journal entries lately. At first it was because I wanted to give something to the Anime readers, but now something much more serious has happened, that forces me to temporarily stop making them.

I am having some personal problems, namely my relationship. As you can guess, it’s a bit hard to try and create something beautiful, when your feelings don’t correspond to that. I will continue to watch and post about Anime, I will probably need to watch a lot of it to overcome the hurt, if things take a wrong turn. But I wouldn’t expect any major Design Journal entries soon. At least until this part of my life is settled.

I’m not going to do like a blogger I knew, and keep my readers, as little in number as they may be, out in the cold. I can’t promise I will post twice a week, like I’ve been doing lately, but with the free time I have I might feel like giving a small monologue about my feelings and my relationship. Maybe it will even feature in the next Scrivs Tyme podcast, who knows?

I would also like to take the opportunity to thank all of the readers who already know of the situation and have been trying to give me moral support. Even though I can’t respond to is as well as I would like to, I just want to say that I appreciate it.

Episode five begins with a completely new character. One which you may remember from the intro, Teresa of the faint smile.

If you watched the first four episodes, you will probably get a deja-vu feeling from watching these. Although the story is different, there are small aspects which you may remember from them.

Teresa is considered the strongest Claymore among all of them. One curious thing about her, is that she never unleashes her powers when fighting the Youma. She slays them with a serene expression upon her face.

On one of the towns Teresa visited, she found a small girl, who after being saved from the clutches of a Youma, decides to follow her, despite Teresa clearly saying that she doesn’t to be followed. After a while, Teresa finally succumbs to her human side, and decides to let the girl follow her. Eventually they become close, and even the cold Claymore starts feeling care and warmth for the girl.

Those feelings that Teresa gains eventually become her undoing, as she disobeys the most important rule of being a Claymore, which is: To never kill a human.

The episodes that follow that act are very dramatic and end up with an excellent, yet heartfelt conclusion and we are finally introduce to what appears to be the main enemy of the story. For obvious reasons I won’t tell you who she is, but at least you can have an idea of what she looks like (and you may even recall her from the intro).

In the next episode we will see the beginning of Clare’s story as a Claymore, and, possibly, what happened to the other characters featured in this small arc.

But those are not all the reasons. Some of the Animes I stopped writing about because of the lack of interest I grew. I stopped Death Note because I had the final volumes of the first “season” of the manga, so I read them, stopped when the second season started, and right now I think until it’s near the end until I resume it. I haven’t been downloading it either.

Kanon 2006 is an anime I want to catch up with again, and one that I was enjoying a lot. Unfortunately, the only friend that I know that is watching it usually takes a long time to share stuff with. So I will have to find a way to download it myself.

Naruto Shippuuden had a great start, but right now I find the pace incredibly slow. They are trying to stretch the story as much as they can, so they won’t catch up to the manga very soon. If they had done that like Bleach or One Piece did I wouldn’t have any complains, but they don’t. I think I’ll wait out until the “cool part” begins before I start watching it again. But I hope that the artists stop what they’re doing to the show right now, because it’s slowly killing it.

The last Anime I watched was Ouran High Host Club (yes, I know I promised the readers a review), and although I haven’t written about it yet, it was a brilliant show. Great story, great character development, great comedy and great animation. It’s an Anime that seems strange at first, but then becomes incredibly addictive. Since the type of episodes drift from drama, to comedy, it’s very hard to grow tired of it.

But now I’ll tell you a bit about Claymore.

It’s not your typical Shonen action anime. There is action, but there is much more violence, and so far, the character development has been great. Which makes me wonder if the show will be very short, or if it will grow stale after a bit.

Last, but not least, I watched today the first four episodes of Claymore. A strange and violent, but very interesting Anime. The concept of the story reminded me of Chrno Crusade a bit, except that this time the story is set in a medieval time.

There are demons in this world called Youma, and in order to fight them, an organization was formed that creates hybrid humans, which are basically normal humans embedded with Youma blood and “skin”, in order to fight with the Youma on equal ground. For some unknown reason, so far only women have survived this transformation, and they are known as the silver-eyed witches, or as Claymores, due to the huge Claymore swords they all carry.

The main character of the story, is one of those said Claymores, and from the very first episode, we see her struggling, and on all of the episodes so far, it seems like the show is just about to end. I was guessing I’d get used to it, but so far I haven’t, and this Anime manages to keep me captivated. The artwork is brilliant, not just the first episode (unlike Naruto and many other series), but throughout all of the episodes so far.

The music is a bit awkward, but so is the story, therefore they complement each other quite nicely.

If you liked Berserk and Chrno Crusade, then I think that this Anime is right up your alley. It’s certainly one to be on the lookout for.

Now that I have a basic layout, all the last step is to arrange the most important aspect of the design. The area where the content will be. If any (real) designers are reading this, they will probably be thinking “Hey… how come the area where the content will be is the most important aspect? Isn’t the rest of the interface more, or at least as important?”. To answer that question, I ask them another one:

When you’re reading a blog, or any other website, how much of your time do you use looking at the interface, and how much do you use looking at the content?

Of course it’s important to have a good looking layout, but it’s very common to see websites with great designs with little or no care for the content area. On the other hand, sometimes you can also find websites with great design, good typography, but with inconsistency in the layout.

Regarding the design, there is no way I can please everyone that visits. Most of the heavy visual elements are in the header, so if you scroll down a bit, you can simply focus on the content, rather than on anything else. And regarding typography, I intend to make the site as easy and nice to read as possible.

Content is king, but if it’s difficult to read the content due to the wrong colors, or length of the line or visual interruptions of the text (like advertisement); you’re better off using your writting skills elsewhere (unless, of course, you’re being payed to write for a website with those conditions).

After much fiddling about, I came to relatively satisfying conclusion.

So what aspects did I consider when making this?

First, I needed a visual element that would make it easy to distinguish when an article begins. In the case of the current version of the design. You can obviously see where the article begins due to the customized background, however, that visual element had a flaw that I only noticed after. If my article’s title exceeds a certain number of characters, you can’t read the exceeding text because it’s color is white.

Since I couldn’t use that same method, I needed something else, a visual cue of some sort. That is when I started considering one of the common “web 2.0″ visual elements. I’m not sure what it’s name is, so I’ll just call it the “date square”. Since the site is already blue enough, or already has too much blue, as some might point out, I decided that using orange as a secondary color fits it very nicely.

From there on, the rest just came naturally, but of course there were many aspects of the text itself that I tweaked, and I will now try to explain some of them.

Contrast - in the very first version of thewhitehawk, the color of the text was gray. At the time, my idea was to give the website colors of the sky exclusively, but then I came to realize that goal came at the expense of readability, and a lot of people commented on how light the text was. When version 1.5 came along, and I was testing out some stylesheets, as soon as I changed the text to black, everyone liked the design much more.Matt Brett, who designed the feedicons website gives a good example on how to use contrast properly.Although there are various different color schemes you can use. If you’re unsure on what you use, or not, you can always go with black against white. And as for all the colors different from all the shades that go from black to white, try to pick one, or a couple, that contradict the background you’re using.

If you’re using a dark background, like Matt, try to use light or strong colors that are easilly distinguishable from it. If you’re using a white, or very light background, like this website, you can pretty much choose any color you want as long as you can easilly tell it apart. Black or dark backgrounds limit you a bit more than light or white backgrounds, because there are some colors which can’t be easilly applied to them, like, for example, purple, or brown.

I could write a whole article about colors, but I’ll leave that for another occasion, or for a future book I might write
Letter/Word/Line/Paragraph spacing - yes, there are all those ways to separate your text, and even more if you really like digging into the CSS, but let’s leave it at those.Despite all fonts having a generic space between characters, some fonts are “heavier” than others. Tahoma, for example, is a good example. All of the characters are “tall”, and when used with default settings, it makes a text look very concise, and hard to read.If you want to use Tahoma as your website’s main font, do your readers a favor and a bit of spacing between the letters.

Line and paragraph spacing are a bit harder to justify. To understand why they need to be adjusted, you need to understand the differences between reading a document, or text, on a computer monitor, from reading it on a piece of paper. I don’t have precise numbers with me at the momment, but several studies have been made and showed that people take much longer to read text that is shown on a computer screen than on a piece of paper.

That is why, as a designer, you should be concerned with making your site as easy, and pleasant to read as possible. When you apply a justified allignment to a text, you are decreasing the speed at which people will read your articles. Why? Because the human eye has to adjust to difference word spacing with each line.Although it may look a bit nicer it difficults reading a little bit.

(As you have probably noticed, the current design of this website has many of the flaws I’m pointing out here, so feel free to consider this a bad example in terms of spacing)

Another thing that difficults reading is the lack of proper line spacing. When you’re reading a piece of paper, a book, you usually use, even if you don’t notice, some sort of guide-line from one line to the next. Some people use their thumbs, others use random objects, but the fact is that when you’re reading a text on the a computer monitor, it becomes harder to follow a text, specially if it’s written in long lines (see next pointer) and has very little space between each line.

There is no golden value for the space you should add between lines. It depends on the font, on how long the line is, and even on the color you use. But if you’re using good contrast, and not too many words-per-line (once again, see next pointer), a good value to start off for the line-height with is the height of one of the smaller characters: for example, the pixel height of the character “e”.

As for the paragraph spacing, once again there is no golden number, but the value of it should be, at the very least, twice as big as the value of the line spacing, to make it distinguishable enough from a line break.

Words per line - The most common, and less aceptable, typography mistake you can make in your website, is to allow the text to have too many words per-line. Some people are fans of liquid design, and for a brief period of the webdesign history, liquid design was very popular. But, as you may notice, most of the modern websites don’t have liquid designs, and it’s not just because it was a fad from the 90’s that faded away.

As I already mentioned above, depending on how many words you have on a line, it may or not become harder for you to follow the text. One of the reasons, as small as it may be, why I believe that blogs became incredibly popular, is because most of them didn’t have liquid designs, compared to forums or BBSs. And those two types of websites are a perfect example on everything you can do wrong in typography.

On 99% of all forums I’ve visited, there are too many words per line, because the design is liquid, there are too many visual distractions that difficult your reading: avatars, images (specially animated ones).

Of course you can adjust the length of your browser to fit your prefference, but that isn’t functional. If that was the case, you would have to adjust your browser’s width for every different website you visited. Obviously that isn’t a very good alternative to having static designs, or designs with static text areas.

And now, I think that I’ve written enough for one Design Journal entry. It might be a few days late, but I think that the size of the post compensates for that.

My original idea, was to create a fading border around the columns, similar to what you can find in the 9rules  homepage. For example, look at the border around the 9rules notes which appears in the topleft corner and fades out very quickly. I wanted a similar effect, something that would explain how the information is aggregated without butchering the rest of the design.

After a lot of tweaking, what I came up with was this:

 The site will have 3 columns, like it currently does, but only the right column will be limited, and only for a shortwhile. Even though there will be no border separating the two right columns, the visual aid will help in indicating the separation between them. But if it doesn’t seem enough, I might just extend it a bit more.

The other tweaks I did were mainly on the hawk’s head, I slightly changed the color and made it a bit stronger. Now I need to balance out the colors, and bring the site’s secondary color, orange, to balance things out.

The first menu attempt was this:

I distinctively remember that at the time when I made this I said to myself: “Ok, I know I want to give this site a Web 2.0 look, but this is pushing my luck: gradients, big letters, reflexions and rounded corners, and this is only the header!”

So that menu was quickly ripped to shreds. Then came attempt number two:

Even though this clearly had a Web 2.0 element to it, and look a little bit nicer (in my opinion, it didn’t fit with the whole design. It was at this time that I started thinking to myself that I was making a mistake with the whole project.

I wasn’t looking at the whole picture. I thought that if I had the header done, the rest of the design would just flow in naturally. I guess I overestimated my capabilities…

What really save the site’s design was the identity I found for it. By choosing the name “Reflexions” for the design, I immediately entered a brainstorm, and hundreds of ideas started flowing in. The first attempt at the menu’s design, since then, was this:

Although I have tweaked it since then, when I look at the design now, it feels “right”. The elements feel much closer to each other than before. The next visual element I will try to use in the side columns will be the blue strike.

Hopefully, I will be able to achieve some effect that makes it seem that the letters are breaking out of it, like the hawk’s head. At least that is the intention.

As irrelevant as it may seem, yesterday I found out that the most important thing about designing a personal website could very well be choosing a name for it, and in the next paragraphs I’ll explain why.

I am a critic at heart. I like to think that all of us are, even if only a little bit. I find it very easy to criticize a blog, and at the same time give helpful advice that will help improve it. In InforQuali, my former job, that “skill” of mine was very appreciated, and all of the projects I worked on were successful in meeting their deadlines and in pleasing the customers (which was sometimes a hard thing to do).

Even though I didn’t realize it then, all of the design projects I worked on were given a name, or at least a concept. And even this site’s current design has a concept behind it, even though I never realized it before.

When I made the first design for thewhitehawk.net (back then the .com wasn’t available), I wanted to make a design that was an homage to Macromedia’s old website, which has “recently” been butchered (in my humble opinion) by Adobe. That meant it would have a title, a horizontal menu, and 3 columns.

Besides having a concept, I already had a layout, two of the most difficult tasks in making a website were already done, before I even opened Fireworks or drew anything.

When it came to designing version 2.0, I wanted to do something completely fresh. I wanted to make something that followed set forth by some, or most, of 9rules’ blogs, while maintaining a style of it’s own. There were some characteristics I wanted to have, and things that I wanted to drastically improve from this version.

To do that, I tried to disconnect myself from this site’s current design, as it’s creator, and look at is a critic, as I tried to when I did version 1.5, which is what you currently see. I came up with different things I wanted the new design to have:

1. Whitespace - something that this design really needs is Whitespace. In version 1.5 things improved a bit in that aspect, but not enough.
2. Less useless links - no one, except myself, has ever used the archive. Specially since there is “search” box on top of it.
3. Less segmented link list - there are many more aspects like this one that I want to cleanup
4. Screenshot-friendly design - If I want to write an Anime and Manga blog I need to have good image integration with the site

I also wanted to keep some visual elements from the last website, like the hawk’s head, which grew from a 50×50 pixels black & white gif, to a vector image which can be used in an infinite number of ways.

So what did I do from there? Well, obviously I opened up Fireworks and started drawing away, and let my imagination carry me. If version 1.0, or 1.5 had a name, it would definitely be “birdcage”. Everything is wrapped around a border, so I wanted version 2.0 to be the oposite of that. That is why the first, and main, element of the new design is the hawk’s head breaking away from a line. And everything underneath it, will supposedly be “free”.

I intend on minizing the use of borders, give the site the “air” it needs for people to enjoy reading it’s content. But is that enough to drive me through the whole design? Of course not.

I though that trying to design a site from top to bottom, and just create things as I come across them would be easy, and I was terribly wrong. So let me spread the message:

Do not try to design a website with separate elements.

You need to design it as a whole. When a child is growing, it doesn’t get a right leg first and a left leg second. A site shouldn&