Katie Harris
Photography, Photoshop, PCs, and all the little stitching in between.
I’ve finished my 300 hour Responsive Web Design coding course with freeCodeCamp, and I promise this isn’t an ad. I found it through The Odin Project, who’ve compiled a bunch of resources for front and back-end coding, utterly free of charge, and apparently at the hands of very openhearted coding enthusiasts who feel the info ought to be free. A freeware fair of the 2020s, knowledge for all… I love it.
I got stuck into web dev coding at 14. At the time it was all inline HTML, hosted through piczo.com (remember that?); it was the social media equivalent of myspace but with endless pages, hyperlinks (you heard me!) to friends’ piczo sites, and even guestbooks. On the face of it, the interface was drag and drop, but me and a few friends would get very into the entirely customisable HTML functionality. There was an avid community of teenaged girls devoted to the perfect minimalist layouts, and the most popular sites (we coded hitcounters too!) were those that were flush with lessons on how to code the prettiest, the grungiest, the most glittery-GIF-filled pages. I trawled these sites like a fiend.
My time writing code on piczo was invaluable. I’d jump straight on after school, crack into writing pages and pages of HTML tutorials for my friends, typing out code in full for scroll boxes to fill with copy/paste markup: colourful cursors, scrollbars, anchor links, customised chat boxes, even inline code photo effects. I’d have comments asking for help if things didn’t work, and I’d notice my watermark on the sites of girls I barely knew at school.
The course I’ve just completed was a little more complicated: advanced CSS, file directories, accessibility for screenreaders, flexbox, cross-axis alignment… I loved it and cursed it and apparently won overall, but maybe every website could do with a few more glitter gifs. Especially atm.
Having learnt what can truly be done with web design these days, I’m planning a little overhaul of this domain. My dad bought it for me when I was 9, just a budding little dork, and has paid the meagre fee to keep it going for nearly 20 years - time to do something fun with it! Wish me luck (rainbow scrollbars: pending).
P.S my piczo url was x-sad.piczo.com. I absolutely wore fingerless gloves and eyeliner to school.
Another quick photo enhancement update! I met this sweet Jersey calf whilst visiting my friend in Cumbria last year, and thought she could do with a bit of a makeover (the cow, I mean, not my friend! Though truly, there’s no such thing as an ugly cow!).
I struggled a bit with patching up her fur, but I think the work is fairly passable if left unmentioned! I mostly used the spot brush and the clone stamp tools, and the liquify filter to even out her head, but also added a vibrancy filter, edited the exposure, changed the levels, and messed with the curves a little bit too.
Case upgrade complete! Supremely quick and easy, and I loved every minute of it. I’m really happy with this new case and can’t believe it’s priced as low as it is. I’ll leave a few links to the components at the end of the post!
I also bought another 4GB of 1600mhz RAM, a new 12″ Arctic F12 case fan, a set of 20 Noctua rubber fan mounts (replaces case fan screws to minimise vibration! More on that in a moment), and a 240GB Kingston SSD!
So, the new case has tool-free, pull out hard drive drawers, and the drive bays have sweet little clip screws that are so easy to use and are deceptively sturdy. I had to buy two new L Shaped SATA cables (the drawers mount the drives sideways, so that the ports are almost completely flush to the case’s sides. Regular, straight SATA cables would have been bent and stressed in every way a perfectionist’s nightmare could entail… shudder…) I’d say the tool-free features shaved about 10 minutes from the overall build time. I love these things, but there’s something so gratifying about putting the extra elbow grease into screwing optical and hard drives into place… By the way, please remember me for my presence at parties and my joie de vivre. Not for this… Not for this.
The new case also has a bottom mounted power supply unit; a pretty modern idea and one which I was a little bit sceptical about. I figured that if heat rises, and a PSU emits heat from the bottom of the case, surely that excess heat will gather at the top of the case and create a fiery, blistering vacuum? But no! It’s loads cooler and quieter, and here’s why; the power supply unit’s fan isn’t extracting all the heat that gathers at the top of a top-mounted PSU case, and so doesn’t have to work as hard to expel that hot air. Instead, it chills (literally) at the bottom of the case, where it does its job supplying power and cooling itself independently, not working as an extractor fan. The rear case fan is doing its job as an exhaust fan alone, and so the PSU runs quieter because its fan isn’t running at full speed 24/7. Top mounted PSUs are also pretty inefficient at expelling heat, so the rest of the machine gets super hot, and then every fan inside works mega hard to cool things down. The faster the fans, the louder they are, and the more fans you have, the louder your machine! Long story short; a bottom mounted PSU looks after itself, and I’m a convert.
Here’s the new SSD! I ghosted my operating system from my 1TB hard drive onto this new solid state drive to improve boot times and install a few favourite games. I was hopeful; maybe a 45 second start-up? Maybe I’d have immediate access to Photoshop! No loading screens whilst gaming! No lag whilst video editing!
And I have exactly that! Almost. My boot time is actually 15 seconds, from button-push to desktop. I honestly couldn’t suppress a giggle. This is absolutely the best investment I’ve made this year. I’d heard good things and seen it in action (my dad uses a 120GB to host his OS) but this was next level and such a big deal. I love living in the 21st century.
The new case actually comes with two 12″ stock fans (including a blue LED one on the front… to make it… go faster, or something, I suppose, probably), but they were a bit too loud. This Arctic F12 is virtually silent when attached to one of my spare Noctua splitter cables (which moderate the speed to a lower RPM, and thus lowering the noise. It potentially sacrifices cooling power, but loud fans drive me crazy and my PC never overheats enough to warrant eternal humming). I mounted this fan on one of the two side windows of the case, so that the intake would immediately hit the CPU and cool it down, also taking some of the overworking fan noise down too. Temperatures while idle sit at around 28°c these days, and only hit around 45°c-50°c while gaming or heavily editing video.
These are the Noctua fan mounts I spoke of earlier! Looking a bit odd in the strange Noctua brand brown/cream colour scheme, but they do the job perfectly (as expected! I love Noctua, and my 8cm exhaust fan of theirs is deadly silent). None of the rubber has torn during repeated installation. The difference between metal screws and rubber fan mounts is huge, and installation and removal is a 5 second job. I replaced the noisy exhaust fan on my brother’s computer last week, replacing the threadbare screws with four of these rubber grommets, and the incessant humming and vibration ceased immediately!
Just another 4GB of RAM, taking the specs up to 8GB, which handles photoshop, final cut pro, and my favourite games easily! Combined with Windows 7 Ultimate on the new SSD, I haven’t experienced a single stutter yet.
Shopping List:
I’m thinking about making a casual guide on starting to build a PC on a budget, and how to start from absolute zero. I learnt a lot about building computers from my dad, who used to build my computers from spare parts lying around, and always encouraged me to work with him to see how it’s done. I’d love to be able to make a few step-by-step guides to buying components, installing them, upgrading and repairing them, and general maintenance…
I’ll have a think about it!
A quick post today! A before and after comparison of an English village scene, after having removed a telephone pole (and reconstructed the wall behind it) and all the burglar alarms, satellite dishes, tv aerials, tyre tracks, and parked cars. I also removed some shadows, cleaned up the path, cropped the photo closer for more pleasing proportions, and added a window to even things out a little bit. I upped the vibrancy and exposure, too!
All performed in Adobe Photoshop CS6 with the clone stamp tool, the healing brush tool, and the spot healing brush tool.
Switching computer cases today! Super overdue… I’m a little bit too excited about it, honestly. I bought a few extra goodies to upgrade the system, too!
Stay tuned for a longer post on the final result later on this week! Expect some unnecessary obsession with cable management, fancy drawers, and other tragedies.
This week I’ve been playing around with photoshop again to come up with a few basic designs for some entirely fictional clients. They’re quite large files; please allow some time for them to load fully in theatre view (or else they’ll be a bit fuzzy)! This was mostly an experiment in pairing fonts and working with a business card format, and trying to break out of my habit of sticking to one style - usually minimalist, gold foil accents, black and white, and straight lines. All were created from scratch with Adobe Photoshop CS6.
1. Rise & Shine - Generic coffee shop graphic, designed for use as a menu header or store signage, with a retro/atomic motif to suit the very ‘70s brown’ colour of the coffee beans. I wanted to go classic, with a bit of an American slant on the font to work with the metropolitan, hipster-ish coffee aesthetic (all leathers, low-fi music, and minimalism).
2. Feel Good FM - Radio station graphic, for use as podcast art and CD-case sized flyers. I used the pen tool and various gradient filters to soften the shapes (designed to mimic equaliser bars and the rise and fall of music beats), and to anchor the gentle, feel-good nature of the station’s genre; low-fi, ambient, chill out. I wanted the fonts to contrast, so I used the 70′s-feel Prisma font alongside a nostalgic digital Smallfonts to echo the diversity of the station’s music; modern summer house alongside more classic tunes from the past.
3. Listen Up - A double-sided business card for a freelance audio tailoring company. Pairing a bold, classic serif font with a sparse, capitalised font again works with contrast in genre. Deep orange-yellow echoes brass instruments and classical orchestral shapes; saxophones, trumpets, trombones; alongside the skinny industrial font often seen on film posters and credit rolls. I applied an inner bevel to the note at the end of the bar of music with the intention of having the motif become a sharp cut-out in the final print, giving the card a padded and textured feel.
4. Flowers by Gina - Another business card, single sided. I wanted to achieve a modern and casual look, with little extra embellishment. I chose soft, pastel colours to tone down the busy vintage bookplate, and used a clipping mask of a bright watercolour texture to fill the client’s name, allowing it to grab the attention immediately, whilst still sticking with the central theme of flowers and the key colours in the art beside it. The telephone and email font colours have been grabbed from the purple end of the watercolour overlay for cohesion, and I have added a subtle drop shadow to make up for the very flat, simplistic background.
That’s all, really! I’m working on some more spreads with InDesign at the moment, and am planning on investing in Adobe Illustrator. Vector art can look so fresh. It’ll be a huge learning curve, but I’d love to have a go for fun (and maybe to embellish my photoshop work, too!).
Where have I been?
Honestly, there is no excuse for why it has taken me so long to update you all on my sewing ventures. I’d like to give a very valid excuse, i.e I’ve Been Feeding Stray Dogs and Taking Them In Because I Am Weak And Soft, but truly it is very much more along the lines of ’I Am Tired and Old’.
Anyway… You might recognise this fabric! I used it for Gemma’s Birthday laptop bag, and had finally succumbed to my dreams of having a sort-of-carpetty skirt with a fancy damask weave. I love it. This skirt is part of my mission to sew and tailor some Professional Work Attire that doesn’t make me look like 3 children stacked inside a man’s suit. This skirt screams ’I spent 3 hours sewing this instead of winning the hearts of men’, and ’I nearly sewed my fingers together to achieve the perfect Joan Holloway concealed zip’.
I wanted the waist band and the skirt to align seamlessly. To do this, I traced the pattern onto the fabric with a 3cm gap between the repeating pattern to compensate for the seams being sewn together and cutting off the pattern in the seams, rather than cutting the two pieces very closely together and sewing them. This meant that I could use a 1.5cm seam allowance which, when sewn, would join the 3cm gap in the pattern together and create a seamless design. Making sense? I have no idea what I just said. Thank you for following this blog.
The pattern matches seamlessly at the back, too! I wanted very much to have a completely concealed zip, but the fabric is just a bit too reinforced to be pressed down flat, so it results in this sort of cute concertina effect. It also gives a bit of reinforcement to the common act of ‘sitting down’, which is something I intend to do daily! I also sewed a triple folded skinny hem, so that the fabric would fall in a perfect circle, weighted by the heavy bottom (ay up). Speaking of heavy bottoms, please forgive the ugliness where puckering and uneveness show! I use my mum’s 1980s dressmaking dummy, which was bought to suit her 1980’s figure (an era where bread bag ties could be used for belts, damn it). One of us has to change, dummy. This town ain’t big enough for both of us.
Next on my potential workwear project is a simple, semi-sheer top. I’ve always looked a little bit strange in button down shirts or blouses, so I’m hoping to make a sort of camisole and sheer, crew neck top combination with some cute capped sleeves!
See you soon!
1. CARSTEN HOLLER Art Installation
A Belgian biologist and artist suspends giant mushrooms from the ceiling, apparently unaware that his extravagant professions reflect only the characteristics of a Bond villain. I’d love to see this installation in the flesh though, truly, and to feel as small and dreamy as a child again!
2. GOOGLE POETICS Poetry
Sampsa Nuotio and Raisa Omaheimo input the first utterances of a sentence into Google’s search bar, and let the anonymous Googlers of the world complete them. Many results are belly-laugh worthy, but a few are tinted with just a bit of isolated strangeness and sadness; reading the questions a few lonely users can’t ask anywhere else. The creators write: “Obviously Google is not Shakespeare, Whitman or Dickinson - it can not illuminate the unknown. But it does reveal our inner workings, our fears and prejudices, secrets and shames, the hope and longing of a modern individual.”
3. VINTAGE PATTERN FILES Free Patterns
Wendy curates the weird, the ugly, and the classic patterns of history, from the 1800s to the 1970s, and offers them to the world for free. This website has inspired me to take up knitting this year as my new year’s resolution! I’d love to be able to knit a cropped short sleeve jumper to wear with some of the 50s pencil skirts shown here! Even if you aren’t a sewist or a knitter, some of the catalogued photos here are just too gaudy to miss.
4. YELENA BRYKSENKOVA Artist Portfolio
Combining two of my absolute true loves, Iceland and watercolour, Bryksenkova paints very sweet, almost monochromatic scenes of Reykjavik. I’d love to frame some of her prints one day! I love the piece where cold socks and gloves hang over the radiator, and of the typical deep black Icelandic home in the snow. Truly painting the dream for me.
5. FOR PRINT ONLY Design
Assuring the world that print isn’t dead, For Print Only displays a huge range of beautiful typography and printing art. Macro photographs of embossed business cards, gorgeous foils and matte blacks with glossy typeface and silkscreening… I am drooling. I want to hoard all of these and maybe even eat them, they’re so lovely.
6. THE CHELSEA ARTS BALL, 1947 History
It’s always so grounding to see that our grandparents, in a time of modesty and societal restriction, were really just as sloshed on New Year’s Eve as we are today. Probably wrongly dubbed as a Ball, bohemians and artists of the Chelsea Arts Club chose December 31st as an opportunity for skimpy costumes, destroying art, and smooching in stairwells. Definitely recommend watching the Pathe news stock footage half way down the article, where the club hires a 120 rugby players to hold back the dandies, though they’re soon overwhelmed when the crowd tears the bar and fibreglass Grecian floats to pieces. Ridiculous and refreshing!