Hands On

I’ve been a pretty cranky blogger of late. I feel like I’m craving something but I don’t know what it is. A little Hypertect Transfer Protocol angst. Hence, the new color scheme on a daily basis and zero new content. You don’t need words, you can read my mind in the irregular appearance of these pages. It’s blue, it’s white, it’s purple, but it’s never quite right. It’s old, it’s new, but then I remember why I ditched an old template in the first place and wonder why I bothered with a new one that looks so unevolved. It’s my own code creation, but the borders don’t match up, or it’s someone else’s and I can’t look at the page without feeling like I’m reading a stranger’s blog.

And while I do believe in the words above all else, I think that both graphic and technical design are paramount to the blogsphere. The colors and shapes that frame content on the web are another facet of every site’s identity. Books are printed and bound, blogs are coded and published. Aesthetics are part of the genre.

I go through phases of frantic design research, flipping through blog rings for ideas, tweaking color schemes, Googling for a website that will “walk me through CSS template with small words and big print so a kindergardener could build the damn thing” or “this is what I want my blog to look like. CLICK. GENERATE.” And then I put something together that I feel moderately proud of and leave it alone for a month. But the need to polish the design itself and my own web design abilities is never quelled, and with each fit of fine-tuning (which always becomes an all out over haul), the pressure I put on myself to be every part of this blog grows stronger. I am the writer. Before I was a blogger, I was a writer, that’s what got me here in the first place. But now I want to be the designer, the coder, the art director and the technician, and I want to do it all on my own. I won’t settle for anything less and that makes it hard to fill my own shoes.

I’ve always been frustrated with painting. Brushes won’t respect my authority. I don’t trust my own hand between my mind’s eye and the canvas. Now, hanging my head before the design and code windows in Dreamweaver, I am fighting the tactile instinct even though I know it’s impossible to reach through the computer screen and nudge each element into place, column widths and pixel borders aside, like a graphic collage of code. I want to be hands on!