I was lamenting this morning to a friend about the lack of blogging action on subsomatic recently. For a domain that has been around for so long, it's too bad that I'm not more attentive. Daily love has been getting a lot of traffic, which is good because I think its a good, intuitive, simple site that showcases crap I collect anyway :)

That being said, there may be a change again soon for subsomatic. I just can't let the site die! We shall see. In the meantime...

For those of you who aren't familiar with Etsy, go there now! I found one store today that is both adorable and inspiring. Bread and butter shop makes the best gift cards. I especially love the embossed one word cards featuring greetings like "I heart you", "drinks?" and "btw". Definitely bookmarked and for 3.50, it's still cheaper than getting crappy hallmark cards.

okay, another completely off-topic youtube vid, but if a blog is not for posting cool stuff, what the hell is it for anyway?

For those of you who don't know me, I'm a crossfitter, so all things athletic and gymnastic are of interest. I found this vid on a crossfit blog.

A little different format to this blog post, but I need to post about this somewhere.

Part of my day job is designing a number of layouts for client websites and themes. On a good week, I will have designed 5 or 6 different rough concepts, general layout and colour scheme. Like so many other designers, I draw a lot of inspiration from the million and two CSS galleries out there, so I spend a lot of time browsing nice sites. It even inspired me to start my own gallery.

Most of the designs that I create are designed with WebAdmin in mind, because almost all the sites we create use WebAdmin as a back end. One of the features of WebAdmin is that clients can manage their own menu, so if there's a new product line, or affiliate, or whatever, they are free to make that change themselves. This, obviously, restricts my ability to create certain kinds of menus. Generally speaking, we don't use images - css offers a lot of options that make this restriction negligable. Another major concern, however, is creating horizonatal menus - the ones that run across the top of the page as opposed to vertical, running down the side. With vertical menus, if a client adds too many menu items, this can potentially break the layout - something we'd obviously like to avoid! As a result, if it's a client that we *know* is going to be very active with their website and make a lot of changes, I quite often will suggest a vertical menu structure which will allow them to add as many top level menu items as they like without comprimising the layout of the website.

So, here I am, working on a Monday morning, designing a wireframe for one of these types of clients. I'm doing my usual browse-around-for-inpiration kind of thing and am noticing a HUGE lack of vertical menus being featured on most of the css galleries. Is this becoming a trend? I know Neilson advocates vertical menus - but pretty designs seem to all have them running across the top? What does this mean for the growing industry of CMS (content managed) websites? Is something like a "menu manager" out of the question to create really slick designs? All these questions...

So there are my thoughts. I personally like the look of horizontal menus a lot better than vertical, but as with most things, there is a time and place for both styles. I think I'm going to make an effort to look for more designs with vertical menus and feature them on dailylove.

HEART! I WANT!

(My programming co-worker thinks I'm a typography geek... )

freshline designs recently posted some pictures of corporate offices that are making me drool. I am a firm believer that if you surround yourself with beautiful creative things, that you will be more creative. For now, I'll settle with the bamboo and little buddha on my desk but continue to have dreams of grandure.

(via freshlinedesign)