I went to the opening reception for The Drawing Room last week. It was a cool mix of drawings, from you-must-be-insane-to-do-that photorealism (Brian Boulton! Whoah…) to non-traditional stuff like Barb Bondy’s copy-stamp masterpiece Work Effort Subset Series: Copy 1. It’s amazing how an artist can make something so intricate and beautiful with a tool as simple and mundane as an OfficeDepot pre-inked copy stamp. Bondy’s piece reminds me a bit of the Letraset drawings of Kelly Mark, also a favourite of mine. They’re both really beautiful, but there’s a little spark of ridiculous oddity in there too.

The show’s on until August 7 as part of the drawing festival Vancouver Drawn. Check it out.

I just stumbled upon Charlie Gilkey’s website Productive Flourishing the other day and learned about productivity heatmapping. It’s a process Charlie developed to figure out when your most productive times of day are.

The picture to the left is a sample of Charlie’s filled-in productivity heat-map, the red slices being his most productive times of day, orange less productive, etc. In his blog post he talks about filling in the heatmap and the kind of useful information he got from doing it.

I must say, I’m curious to see what my heatmap will look like. It’d be rad to have some empirical data on when my creative energy is in the “nova” stage, as Charlie calls it, because then I can make sure I’ve got my butt in the work chair during that time.

I do suspect, however, that my heatmap probably won’t be anywhere near as active at 8am as Charlie’s is :)

The link to download the blank heatmap template is at the bottom of the article. The website also has lots of other cool articles on productivity and creativity, so check it out if you happen to be creative and also enjoy, uh, being productive. Yeah.

Woo! A whole festival JUST for drawing. And it’s happening in my city. I’m excited. There’s just something so special about drawing as an art form and mode of expression. It’s like the underdog. Everybody tends to get their panties into a twist about painting while drawing is there working away behind the scenes, always making more awesomeness for the world. It’s nice to see it get some attention.

The festival runs July 17 to August 7 at venues all over the city. Visit the website for details. (FYI, submissions for the show at the Pendulum gallery are open until June 1st.)

The Alliance For Arts and Culture website has a nifty section filled with postings of calls for submission for various art shows and other opportunities for artists and creative types in the Vancouver area. Check it out!

They also have a job board that is specifically for arts-related job postings.

Like every other web developer on the planet, I hate IE6. It’s buggy. It doesn’t support png transparency. Things that work in other browsers and are written with beautiful, standards-compliant code wind up broken and wonky in IE6 solely because it doesn’t interpret the code properly. It’s probably made at good number of otherwise sane people lose their minds.

I keep checking the browser statistics every couple months to see how many people on the web are still using this antiquated beast. It’s down to 7%. Is that low enough for me to stop catering to its buggy idiocy? I want to say yes, but I find myself reluctant to let 7% of a client’s website traffic see an ugly, broken website. I’ve always gone out of my way to make sure websites to look awesome for everybody, regardless of what computer or browser or font size they’re using.

So I guess that means I’m still at the whim of IE6. Blarg. Maybe when it’s usage is down to 1 or 2%, I’ll quit bug checking in it. And then I’ll have a party! Woooo! Soon… Sooooon….

Here’s a list of some of my favourite websites for designers… the ones that I ACTUALLY use. I bookmark a lot of useful-looking sites, but these are the ones I actually revisit.

CG Textures
I *love* browsing through the photos at CG Textures. They have boatloads of good quality hi-res texture photos, and they’re well-organized so you can find what you want quickly. Plus, they’re free!

Stock.xchng and StockXPERT
Two affiliated royalty-free stock photo sites

Brusheezy
Free Photoshop brushes

ColourLovers
A great site for picking out colour combos

PSDTuts+
This is far and away my favourite website for Photoshop tutorials. The lessons and sample projects unveil the secrets of professional-looking Photoshop wizardry, and the steps involved are clearly explained. Anytime I feel like learning or trying something new, I go here.

CSS Zen Garden
Ahh, the magic of CSS! When I was first learning CSS, I stumbled upon this website and was amazed by all the variation you can get just by changing your style sheet. I go back every now and then to get inspired.

Design Reviver
This is the kind of website I can accidentally spend three hours browsing around. SO many helpful tips, tutorials, and freebies.

Wordpress
Wordpress is a free blog and content management system that you can install on your own web server. It kicks ass! When I first started using content management systems, I messed around with Drupal, but in the end I found Wordpress to be more user friendly.

Loren Ipsum Generator
There always comes a time when I’m working on a new website design that I need some garbage text to fill in the layout. Loren Ipsum Generator to the rescue! You can specify how many words/paragraphs/lists you want.

W3 Schools
This is THE place to look up anything code-related. It’s a good place to learn coding too, if you are so inclined to enter the mad worlds of XHTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, DOM, ASP, XML… Ahh!

HTML Validator and CSS Validator
Check your code! When I’m finished coding a site, I always run it through these validators. It can be pretty dreadful if it says, “Hey, you have A BAZILLION ERRORS!”, but in the end, it’s better to know and fix it than to not know and have broken code.

Floatutorial
For anybody out there trying to figure out what the heck is going on with their CSS floats, this is a useful little tutorial. I think floats are probably the thing that screw you up the most when you’re first learning CSS.

BrowserShots
With this site you can check what your website looks like in different browsers and operating systems. Useful! It’s free, which is awesome, but that also means that when you submit your site you have to wait wait wait wait wait to get your screenshots.

Alright, that’s it for now. If you know of any other online resources you think I might like, let me know or post a comment.