WellMedicated - Inspiration Overdose

Now that the summer is officially coming to an end this would be the most inopportune time to mention the importance of taking a vacation… but I’m going do it anyway.

You hear it all the time: how a change of scenery can inspire or how relaxation will recharge you – I never bought into it.  But having just returned from a 12 day excursion to the West Kootenays in British Columbia I have to admit I’ve changed my tune.

I never realized it before, but I think that the footer end of a blog post is perhaps the most under appreciated element of web design today.

For the most part, this is where us designers cram all the leftovers we can’t put anywhere else in our layouts into one confined space.

Social bookmarking links and ‘related posts’ lists are the blog designer’s equivalent of yesterday’s over-cooked turkey and dried out mashed potatoes – sitting in your fridge, never to be eaten.

In a feeble attempt to stir up some buzz for my upcoming free WordPress theme (release date to be determined), I thought I’d give you all a sneak peek at my next WordPress opus: ZinePress.

ZinePress is not exactly a full-on heavy-duty Magazine theme, but she’s not exactly a standard blog design either – hence the name; ZinePress.  Pretty complex stuff, I know.

As a designer, I feel that this is some of my strongest work.  I am so stoked for this release that I just can’t wait any longer to let the cat out of the bag.  But for the time being, this scaled down screen-shot will have to do.

The other day I finally got my act together and added some social bookmarking links to the bottom of my blog posts. Being a WordPress user I was presented with a lot of options to make this process easier. Plugins like Sociable and ShareThis will have your blog going viral within minutes.

But what about us hand-coding control freaks who want pixel-perfect placement? Or us plugin-phobics who try to avoid excessive use of plugins if at all possible? I just didn’t find these plugins flexible enough to meet my admittedly over-demanding needs.

With a little (and I mean a little) PHP you can have the perfectionist’s control over your social bookmark links.

When I’m not geeking out over design you can probably find me geeking out over film.  I spent a good 7 years of my life working behind the counters of various video stores across Western Canada and consider myself an avid film nerd.

So it’s not surprisingly that my jaw nearly hit the floor when a coworker introduced me to the wonderful world of Polish film posters a couple of years ago.  These conceptual masterpieces put the original American posters to shame every time; they are truly beautiful works of art.  Trimming this list down to a mere 50 posters that I absolutely love was surprisingly difficult.

Most of us freelance designers spend the majority of our consciousness sitting in front of a computer.  If we’re not doing actual design work, we’re communicating with clients, managing our finances or catching up on our twitter feeds – all of which also involve using the computer. I figure I spend between 45 – 70 hours a week at the computer depending on my workload, and as such have felt physical effects of prolonged computer exposure.

Here are a few things to be weary of if you work from home and hope to make it out in one piece.