I’ll also be removing the whole “affiliates/link exchange” thing, I don’t have a website in order to create money so getting thousands of hits it’s not necessary. I’ll continue to add links to people’s sites that I admire or read quite frequently. So your link may stay up, it may not… and you may keep mine up or you can take it down, it’s entirely up to you So without further ado I present to you: Arteezio. Odd name yes, but that will all be explained when it’s open.

In “Me” news:

I got my glasses! I had to have corrective lenses as one eye is stronger than the other and my sights just a TAD blurry. I shouldn’t have been allowed out on my own to choose them though. I have no willpower, I went straight for the ones I had already seen online… the ones that would bring my total cost that day to… wait for it… £350 I bought the Prada ones, I couldn’t help it, they were so pretty and sparkly compared to all the others. But it’s worth it though, right? It’s kinda like an investment, if I ever need a stronger prescription they just change the LENSES. So it’s alllll good.

I have a lot of other stuff I COULD say but I won’t, I really can’t be assed to type anymore, so I’ll just make a quick list! …and go:

1. Had blood test, HATED it. I now have a lime-green bruise on my arm. Still waiting on results (fingers crossed!)
2. I’m due an upgrade on my phone contract and I reallyyyy want a Blackberry. When you do it online it takes THREE working days to go through. Grr!
3. I’m not going to try to be an “all-rounder” anymore where it comes to design, I’m going to pick a few key areas and just make myself better in those areas.
4. I am now ADDICTED to KFC! Cheesy BBQ Rollers = win!
5. I changed my twitter account to sync with my new domain. You can see part of the logo for my new site on there: Check out my twitter!

That’s all for now, I’ll speak to you all again soon

1. N.design Studio – Create an Abstract background. A little something to help you create a nice wallpaper for your desktop, this will introduce you to the Blend tool used in Illustrator.

2. Blog.SpoonGraphics – Learn how to use the basic tools to create a “flying bat ghost type fellow” – pretty quick and easy to follow.

3. Vector Diary – Wood grain effect, in this tutorial you will be introduced to the Warp, Twirl and Pucker tools.

4. Abduzeedo – Swirl Mania! This is my favourite tutorial, it shows you a few different techniques that will help you to produce some pretty swirls!

5. Ai Vault – Create an Envelope Icon. Use this tutorial to create your own e-mail icon, looks like it could come in handy

I hope you find this list helpful, I don’t use tutorials myself but I’m definitely going to try these ones out!

Update: Edited my About Me page, it’s still not completely finished, but it will do for now

Guess who’s been playing in Illustrator again? Hehe.

Now if you didn’t guess what my surname was in my last post, this should be a BIG hint.

At the moment I’m trying to create a “character” for my personal domain, I’m not too sure which way to go though. I started drawing a girl, got bored and started to draw the image to your left. It’s so hard to think up an identity, instead of having my name as a logo I’d rather have an image, something memorable. I suppose I had better get my thinking cap on! I actually had just finished drawing this when Illustrator decided to just close on it’s own JUST as I was about to click the save button, so I had to start all over again!

Any feedback would be appreciated! Good or bad

I haven’t really got anything to blog about, except for the fact that I have a few days off next week and a blood test to look forward to. I’m being tested for a number of things, anaemia, cancer, liver disease and some other crap. I’m getting old, which means my health is deteriorating. Ooh I’m also planning on getting my eyes tested, I can guarantee I’ll be leaving the opticians with glasses, my eyes are awful. Okay that’s enough babbling, I’m going to run away now and do some other photoshop/illustrator related things, so I’m going to leave you with some questions…

Questions:
1. Have you seen The Vampire Diaries? (I’m only asking as it is my new obsession)
2. Do you wear glasses?
3. What’s your favourite website (blog)?

Updates: 2 Wordpress Tutorials – Styling the Search Form & How to create a Search Results page.

Yesterday the server I am hosted on was experiencing some difficulties which caused all our sites to be down and they are still restoring them from back ups now. I wasn’t too worried, I trust the people at Surpass, they know what they are doing. I’ve been thinking about the fact that I can host people, I mean I pay $30 a month for a reseller and the people I host aren’t even that grateful. I don’t have the requirement that most people do “you must keep in contact with me”, but it would be nice to know if you no longer need me to host you, after all you are taking up my space, the space I offered you for free!

I think I’m wasting my money, so I may cancel my reseller account and just used shared hosting (only cost me $12 for the YEAR) as it offers plenty of space and bandwidth, only thing I can’t do is have separate cPanels for each domain. If and when I decide, I will let the people I host know so they can move on.

Okay, enough of the negative stuff.

In relation to my last blog I mentioned being too embarrassed to tell people I know offline about what I like to do in my spare time (I usually just lie). Yesterday I told a few of the people I work with and guess what? They didn’t make fun of me (well not to my face at least) and they were really supportive. They also let slip that they are quite jealous as I have something that I’m interested in and that I want to take further, whereas they have nothing that they are particularly good at. I didn’t tell them about this site but I did say that I was going to be creating a portfolio under my real name (emma*****.com) – I’ll give you a hint, my surname is also the name of a fruit! It’s quite an embarrassing name, but I’ve gotten used to it, obviously. But yes, you may laugh if you can figure it out

Speak soon!

This is going to be a short blog. I just wanted to say that like many other people I’m becoming tired of the “blogging scene”. I hardly ever have anything to blog about and I’m also getting tired of hiding my true self (under all the different domains etc…) I hate the fact that I can’t share what I love to do with people who I actually know and love (not that all my online buddies aren’t great, you’re all awesome<3!) It's just becoming annoying, I'm coming to that time in my life where I just don’t give a fuuuuckkkk. So what if people think I’m a sad act, designing is what I love to do and I’m not going to be ashamed of it anymore. I don’t spend my weekends getting drunk and sleeping with random guys like the majority of my friends do, I stay home, read books on design/coding and of course I practice any new/old techniques to make myself better.

I registered a domain using my full name, which for me is kinda big because my name is one that most people choose to take the piss out of, at school it was worse but the older I get the more I realise some people are just a bunch of twats and it’s never going to grow old. I won’t be closing this site anytime soon, but I won’t be working on it an awful lot either. I’m going to put my time into my new domain and designfiends.com.

Righty I’m off to cut off what little hair my dad has left haha, and I will leave you this: Kre8tivity’s Theme Previewer (I recently updated it)

Enjoy what’s left of your weekend and I hope you have a good week at school/college/work/whatever the heck you’re doing! Toodles!

As you can see by the title I am actually in a good mood for once, usually I feel down about everything but it’s amazing how one little thing can change everything. If you have read any of my past blogs you will know that I hate my job and feel as if I’m going nowhere with it. Yesterday those feelings changed. It was like any other day, my supervisor was in a foul mood and therefore that mood made everyone else feel that way too. Then one of the top guys calls me over to do a “job” for him, it was just calculating some figures for him but nonetheless in my 2 years of being there he hasn’t spoken to me once, apart from the odd hello now and again.

There is one top boss that rarely even comes into the office (he’s always on holiday I swear) and there are 2 below him and then 2 of our floor managers. The second guy also comes round to reception and asks me to make some reservations for him, again he’s never ever spoken to me before. I know you’re probably thinking well you sound like a bit of a skivvy (someone that does all the crappy jobs) but I’m going somewhere with this, I promise.

So the afternoon comes and I have to go off and do some filing, I run into one of the top guys again and he starts asking me about web design. I was shocked, I mean it was only yesterday afternoon that my manager found out about what I can do in terms of graphic/web design, can news really travel that fast? Anyway, my manager had skipped out for a meeting with the top top top guy and as soon as she walked back into the office she calls me over. I don’t know about you but I always feel as if I’ve done something wrong when my name gets called out by anyone with any authority

So what did she say? “I’ve told Mr. Top about you and he’d like to see what you can do”. Now where I work that is a BIG DEAL, because he rarely acknowledges people on reception, I must have done something right to get a recommendation from my manager though right? With that being said I was given new copies of Dreamweaver CS4 & Photoshop CS4 to take home, yes to take home! I’m so happy, I feel as if things are finally falling into place. I don’t know what happens from here but I hope something good comes of it.

This past week has also had it’s bad parts. One day last week it snowed overnight and then iced up the following morning. I managed to walk all the way to work and just as I was walking to a crossing I FELL, I mean really FELL. It was so embarrassing and also really painful, I’m still in a lot of pain right now. I had ice/snow all stuck to my bum and all the people waiting in the traffic saw. Not a good start to the day!

Ahh it’s pancake day next week (Shrove Tuesday), I’m so excited… I loveeeee pancakes. There’s a group on FB called “Fuck valentines on the 14th, it’s Pancake day on the 16th”… you know I joined it too :P

Okay, I’ve babbled enough… I just really needed to let all my happiness/excitement out Ciao for now!

We didn’t go anywhere special just into town (our shopping centre isn’t that great btw). It was payday on Friday and I badly needed some new clothes seeing as my weight-gain plan has worked. I’m now a size 6/8 on the top and 8/10 on the bottom, last year size 6 clothes would literally hang off me. I bought some new jeans, jeggings, a cute studded top, a studded bag and some Clinique face products.

I spent way too much money, but I really don’t care… it felt good!!! I had subway for lunch which was ever so yummy. I usually rush around, buy what I want, then leave. It was nice to just relax and take my time, after all shopping is a very tiring sport.

I haven’t been on much this weekend, it’s kinda nice to have a break from it all though. No pressure to update n all. Applications for Design Fiends are coming along nicely, I got more good feedback than I expected. Well I thought I’d just check in, hope you’ve all had a good weekend and stuff! Bye for now

As some of you may know I recently purchased a domain that I was planning to use as a Resource only site. After some good old thinking, I have decided it might be easier if I had a team of people to work with, the more the better. It’s hard creating resources all by yourself especially if you have other things to attend to, so I thought why not see if any of the design community wanted to get involved. I still need to think some things through, but by all means if you are in any way interested please do get in touch! It will consist of the usual: tutorials, photoshop/paint shop pro resources (brushes, patterns, gradients etc) and free themes. For more info visit: Design Fiends

I also signed up for formspring! I’ve seen it about and since I’m too lazy to install an ask me script on here I thought it would come in handy.

I don’t really have much else to say offline-wise, apart from the fact that I watched The Lovely Bones yesterday. I found it really weird, not good, not bad, weird. I’ve also been really lazy this weekend, I’ve been napping lots and just watching the time go by. Boring? Yes. Will I do anything about it? No.

I actually have one little thing to rant about (kinda). Lately I’ve been noticing around this side of the blogosphere (young, unqualified designers) that there are some clique issues going on. Well at least I think so. I won’t mention any names/websites, but it seems as if some people only want to be associated with people within their “little group”.

I don’t know maybe I’m just being paranoid but sometimes it feels like I’m on the outside looking in. I can’t quite put my finger on what has made me think like this either. The whole time I was writing this I was thinking about Mean Girls haha. Can’t we all just get along?

Today’s To do list:
1. Wash the dog, she seriously stinks… I blame the snow!
2. Clean my room. I always do it on the weekend, just to make finding stuff easier on Monday.
3. Me. Hair treatments, nails etc… all that girly crap
4. Make up for not posting anything for my daily365 last week. Bad Emma!!

That’s pretty much all I have to do today, hopefully I can get it all out of the way by 12pm so I can just chillax (chill+relax) for the rest of the day.

In other news (I love saying that hehe) I’m back at work now, unfortunately. I had a half day on Friday (9am-12:30pm) just because by 12pm I am usually in an awful mood and I’m wanting to go home by then. I’m not really a people person and guess what my job is – I answer the phones all day long, we (6 girls on reception) redirect all the incoming calls to the correct departments. Some members are just complete twats!

Also, my Sheer Cover came! I tested it out yesterday and WOW! Such a difference. I don’t particularly like wearing foundation but I feel that I have to because of the lovely skin condition I have at the moment, but this doesn’t even look/feel like you’re wearing anything. It gave my face a lovely glow and although the swelling/puss is gone, the marks will still be there until the skin is completely healed and when that time comes I’m ditching the foundation. Did I mention I’m on antibiotics for the next 6 months? So that means no drinking, I’m not allowed on the sun beds (I don’t go on them often anyway) because my skin will burn. So yeah, fun times!

Well I’m off to start on my list. I hope you all had a good first week back at school/college/uni/work Bye for now!

I’m baaaaaack, with a new layout too! I downloaded the Illustrator trial just because of the awesomeness of the vector quality, I also hear it’s great for logo design too. I’m so used to doing everything in Photoshop so this was definitely a challenge for me, it took me a day and a bit to figure it out, even the most simple of tasks in PS seemed like a nightmare to figure out in AI. Why Ninjas? I really have no idea, I’m guessing I’ve seen something to do with ninjas in the past few days and not even realised it. I started to draw and this is what happened.

I’m currently working on a new website where I can post tutorials, resources, hold contests etcetera. I want it to be perfect, so it could be a few months until I release it, the logo is on its way to being finished though. I was thinking of scrapping my blog completely but that would be a crime! I need somewhere to blog, even if nobody reads it, I really don’t care. It’s just nice to have somewhere to vent and share my opinions with other people. With that being said, Kre8tivity.nu is here to stay!

That’s all I have to say for the moment. I’ma go now, not because I want to but because I HAVE to; I’m bloody starvinggggg (I’ve been working on this damn layout for about 7 hours hehe)

Speak to you all soon!