Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Day 259

Sometimes it's the little things that end up being the most difficult.  I spent the entire day trying to decide whether a simple website background color was purple, burgundy, russett, rust, or some other reddish/bluish variant. I'm a bit of a color snob. I have a well-calibrated 30" monitor that I totally trust when I am doing print jobs. I'm confident that what I see on the screen will look exactly like what comes off a printing press later. None of this does me any good when I am designing websites though. Usually, when I see my site for the first time on the client's ten year old Dell monitor, I am horrified. The colors look completely different and often even the basic shapes are distorted, because someone has set the monitor to stretch the image to fill their wide aspect ratio screen.

This is the frustrating thing about websites. Something that looks good with Internet Explorer, might look terrible with Firefox. I use Safari but nobody else has even heard of it. Colors that look spot-on when viewed on a Mac might look oddly off when viewed in a Windows environment. The same font can look completely different on two different browsers. The variables go on and on. Why does this have to be so difficult? The bottom line is that the site needs to look good on my clients computers, because they're never going to see it on mine. I had so much trouble matching a color on a client's business card today that I finally just put a color swatch online and asked them to pick the color that came the closest. I thought I had nailed the color exactly, but it wasn't even close when we looked on their monitors.

Yeah, I know this sounds totally geeky and boring, but that's all that happened today. Dot got her teeth cleaned, but she isn't talking about it. When we came home from the vet, she gave me one of those "how could you" looks. She hates going to the vet. Her teeth look great though. A lot of people ignore their dogs teeth, but it's important to keep them clean. Gum disease can cause serious problems, or even death, for dogs later in life. Of course all this is probably equally true for me. I guess I'd better add "make a dentist appointment" to my to-do list.

I can't figure out why the battery on my iPhone runs out three or four times as fast as the battery on my iPad. The iPad will stay charged for almost a week, but the phone seems to need a charge almost every day. Maybe the phone just has a smaller battery. Or maybe it's still on even in sleep mode waiting for a call. My knowledge of cell phones is abysmally small.

Dalmatian of the Day

    Watch of the Day