Keep­ing a jour­nal is a great tool to learn and con­tin­u­ous improve­ments.  So, I need to start jog­ging down my thought process when doing things and hope­fully improve more in the future.

Before I came up with this theme, I was mess­ing with one of the Woo Themes called Irre­sistible.  In a mat­ter of fact, I was so zoned into mod­i­fy­ing that theme, that I was com­pletely stuck.  My boyfriend also told me that isn’t “me” that the theme was too dark and grungy.  He said I need some­thing “happy”.  Got a few ideas of “happy grunge” and things like that, but just couldn’t incor­po­rated the idea.  After a while, I just decided to scrap the entire thing and started off some­where else.

I started to work on the logo first, and I had a good idea what I want.  I really like the + signs embed­ded inside the logo that because that trans­late my idea of “learn­ing” – also inspired by video games such as The Sims.  When a Sim learns some­thing new, it gets a ++ sign over their heads as in gain­ing level.  After work­ing on the logo for a while and picked two col­ors I really like, Orange and Dark Gray – I took a break:

Then I ran­domly grabbed a photo book lying around on my desk – which was by Getty Images – titled Infin­ity.  Flipped a few pages, and there I had it:

Then I drew the lay­out on a piece of paper, along with the logo I already had to glue the ideas together.  I’ve always been a sucker for sim­ple designs, and flat col­ors.  So it is ended up as what it is right now.  A few peo­ple sug­gested, actu­ally 5 of 3 peo­ple sug­gested that it is bet­ter cen­tered.  Up till yes­ter­day, the lay­out was still left aligned.  So there, I’ve taken other people’s advice and made it cen­tered.  I am still fix­ing minor things here and there, but the site looks 90% the same across most major browsers – espe­cially IE6.  There are a few plu­g­ins seem to be bro­ken, because it is scream­ing when you open the site in IE – need to sort that out.  Even­tu­ally, I’ll have to fix up Socia­ble because it has a lot of invalid HTML/CSS, even though my theme is validated.

One last note, if you are using WP-Spamfree‘s con­tact form, the Sub­mit but­ton align­ment will prob­a­bly drove a lot of you crazy.  That because the author add a <label> before each <input> field excepted the Sub­mit but­ton.  If you dig inside the plu­gin and find the “con­tact form” and insert <label></label> before the sub­mit but­ton, you will able to adjust the align­ment a lot easier.