1337 designer skillz

1337 Designer skillz - I has dem - NOT!

The new Valerie at Home brand is coming along nicely. But I didn't design it. I've gotten to be involved in working on it, messing with the blogger template and tracing Mrs. At Home's work, but the creativity is all hers. But for the more technical, here are some of the things we've done over the past few days:

• Set up a subversion repo here on our data disk to keep this under version control. Just got through fixing the permissions on the repo so that Mrs. At Home and I both can check in.
• Mrs. At Home used Pages '08 to make a very nifty banner concept based on her work at Dish it Out.
  
• Since we couldn't export the graphic from Pages '08 in a graphical format, yesterday, I just did a screenshot of the banner and put that up until...
• I traced over the graphic today with Inkscape.  Using Inkscape, we'll be able to make the graphics as big as we want without losing quality.  Behold the power of SVG (or any vector graphic).
• Based on the color scheme and style Mrs. At Home selected, I made a favicon for the title bar, tab bar (in Firefox), and the title of each post.  I did this using Inkscape again so that I could take the very same graphic and enlarge it for the ping pong drop (see later).
• Mangled and mangled the previous Blogger template to get all the stuff to work.  In particular, there were some interesting spacing issues created by the graphics they were using that it took me awhile to find and get corrected.

Hopefully it will be close to presentable before the She Speaks con.  Mrs. At Home also wants business cards, letterhead, 10,000 bumper stickers, a billboard, a blimp, and to drop 1.84 million ping pong balls on uptown Charlotte with the new logo.  After all that, here are some of the next steps to do to the blog:

• Simplify the layout using YUI.  And I mean completely starting over.  This should seriously simplify things.
• Ensure all the colors are complimentary to the colors of the logo and banner, including ads from Google Adsense and any other external content that's brought in.