Musings of The Reluctant Gentleman

A Simple Man's Personal View

Deliberate Practice Plan

Every weekday morning when my wife leaves for work at 7:30 AM, I will retire to my office and I will work until 9:00 AM on page layouts and design. I will try to create two to three different page designs each week. This will include some current projects that I have going and will also include projects that I have conceptualized and put on hold. I will initially post them on my personal web page at reluctantgentleman.com and I will solicit feedback from friends and colleagues in the business. I am affiliated with the San Gabriel Valley chapter of the LA Drupal Group where I have colleagues that are professionals in the web design business. When my new website at wall2webdesigns.com is ready to go, I will move them all into the portfolio section of the website where public comments will be available.

The goal will be to perfect my CSS layout skills, to apply principles of usability, and to improve my mastery of principles of graphic design and composition. It will necessarily include some honing of my Photoshop composition skills since that is where I do my initial designs and I then convert my PSD files into CSS and HTML.

Deliberate Practice Journal

Week2

This week I spent about 4.5 hours specifically on my Deliberate Practice sessions though it is hard at times to know when I am doing Deliberate Practice and when I am engaged in other types of personal development work. All of my personal projects serve the dual purpose of perfecting my skills and developing ideas that I hope to monetize.

I worked on getting my SGVbirds website back online and I have been tweaking the Drupal theme on that site. It is located at http://sgvbirds.com. It features my personal photography so far. In the future it will have contributed galleries by other aficionados, professionals, aspiring professionals and skilled amateurs. I still need some additional tweaks to the CSS. This site is a personal website that I am using to do several things. I am honing my theming skills and improving my CSS layout and composition skills. I am indulging my personal passion for nature, wildlife, and birds and waterfowl in particular. I am also developing some modules that I will use to create half a dozen related sites that will allow photographers to post their work. They will connect to a print on demand system to produce fine art quality reproductions of the photographs for sale to the public. There will also be custom calendars, t-shirts and, other items that are printed on demand with images from the photo galleries.

I also worked in Photoshop on my page design for my Wall2Web Designs site that is offline and in complete overhaul mode. I will include some of that work in next week’s journal entry.

Week 3

This week I spent about eight hours doing Photoshop layouts and designing Header art for web sites that I am working on or planning. I made several versions of headers for my business web site that is undergoing a complete redesign. I have been practicing with graffiti effects on some brick wall images that I have. I made several versions and so far this is the one that I am leaning on although I have not been very happy with the way it has looked on several layouts that I have tried so I might try some more tweaks to the image.

Graffiti on the wall header image

I will post some of the layouts in future editions when I am happy with the way that they look.

Week 3

This weeks practice included several more variations of graffiti on wall headers. I have been playing with the contrast of the desaturated version of the wall picture that I use for the displacement map and I also have experimented with the blending controls. I am learning some deeper details of some rather subtle effects in order to try to make the effect more natural. I also tried a colored version and I will continue to play with the effect until I am truly happy.

I also have experimented with page layouts using these graffitti logos. The most recent efforts involved using a grunge style image of a concrete wall as the page background beyond the edges of my 1070 px fixed width layout. For the page area I have tried several dark colored backgrounds with textured background blocks for my text areas. I hope to have it ready to post for next week's update.

A second project I am working on is an improved version of the logo for the professional organization that I belong, The Musical Instruments Technicians Asssociation. I am third vice president and I develop and maintain their web site amongst other duties. I am in the process of totally redoing the web site.

Second variation of graffiti on wall Third variation of graffiti on wall fourth variation of graffiti on wall

Week 4

This week I spent over 10 hours working on HTML5/CSS layouts. I concentrated on using proper HTML five tags and making everything compliant and verifiable. I have 6 basic layouts that I am converting to HTML5 semantic design. after I have all of the HTML and the CSS in place and I am happy with the the basic layouts I will test them on my regular suite of browsers to see that the give satisfactory results on all them. Once I reach that point these will become my template portfolio for future Design Work.

Week 5

This week was a really time constrained week for me. Between welfare issues that I had to take care of and numerous big projects that were due in every class including my teaching assignment for this class I was swamped. I did spend about three hours polishing my templates. They are still a work in progress but the can be found at Templates

Week 6

This week I was battling the flu most of the week. When I wasn't sleeping I was in a bit of a stupor. I manage to eke out a couple of hours of low productivity that I intended to be my my deliberate practice. I poked at my templates and then I tested some styling on my web site. Most of the time that I had coherency I worked on building my web site or doing other homework.

Week 11

This week I spent 5-6 hours working on my templates. I have converted them to proofs for some personal projects that I am working on and I added some alternates to some of the basic template types. They can be found at. http://reluctantgentleman.com/templates.php.

The ones that I have done work on this week are.

Featured Content Template Alternate Featured Content Template Three Feature Gallery Template Alternate Three Feature Gallery Template