Friday

I writhed. I wriggled. I thumped the desk and gritted my teeth.

 

I got a cup of ginger tea. I came back.

 

I squirmed. I shifted. I pushed shards of frustration out through my brain. I reviewed the code. I checked the videos for the umpteenth time.

 

I blow flecks of fire out from my nose. My moustache caught on fire and I ran back to the kettle for a refill.

 

I spied the computer evilly from the corner of my kitchen. I swore in my head. I was sure I must have crossed a line somewhere, and the internet gods were now laughing at my seething anger with delight.

 

But it was only a background shadow. It can’t be so difficult. I rallied myself, downed the tea, and returned to the desk.

 

I was emotionless, checking. Step by step. No, that’s okay. Yes, I did that. Aha. Oh. Oh, maybe I didn’t type </div>.

‘Tis a sin, and I corrected my ways.

Walla!!

 

 

 

Thursday

My client gave me a USB full of files from a photo shoot a few weeks ago. They are what you’d expect for a massage salon: fleshy backs, satisfied smiles, candles highlighting the actual spiritual experience available, frangipanis scattered at random through the frame like we are in Hawaii…

 

  

 

Wednesday

I work in spurts. I’m very pleased to say some of them can be fairly sustained for 3 or 4 hours, but only if I have a full stomach and a decent selection of teas (leaf Green tea, Peppermint and English Breakfast are on heavy rotation at the moment). Who’d have thought learning how to make a website would increase your gas bill.

I’m actually writing this days later than Wednesday. The main reason is it’s difficult to focus intensely on acquiring a new skill and then pause as it all begins to make sense to blog about it. All you want to do is use the knowledge.

YouTube is proving to be a God-send, once again. I’m so happy people have a reliable proud streak which wants to show off the knowledge they have. I’m able to get several approaches to every problem  I’ve faced, with teachers with Indian, Arabic, Alabam(ic?), Cockney and Aussie accents. It’s the UN of design.

And… being YouTube, there was the obligatory distraction. Here were some of the strange corners I found myself in.

Christopher Hitchens pinning a rapper to the wall.

Jeff Madrick talking about the dirt in the American financial system.

Milk pouring into water at 2500fps.

How a kiss works. (The BBC – huh?!)

Impossibly good Japanese dancers.

Japanese Rock gods Zazen Boys.

Yes. YouTube was the reason why I have been able to do so much in so little time, and also the reason why I did not do as much as I could have. haha

Here’s the transformation of the logo…

 

 

 

 

Monday

Good. I’ve reached one of those moments where the shackles of procrastination have fallen off and the process of knuckling down to some hardcore learning has started. I’ve been a design layman for a long long time, with nominal skills in ye olde Adobe applications like Photoshop and Illustrator, but without the need or desire to really extend myself and put them to work in a major way.

Picking up skills in web-development brings all of those back to life.

The most daunting step for me is how to build a website. I’m no fool to think that those spankingly clean websites are as easy to design as they look, in fact I’m very aware of the difficulty. I may even suffer from a mild obsessiveness which imagines all kinds of cogs and systems lying underneath the surface, increasingly complicated and destined to undo my efforts and create a frustrated, sweating computer lackey out of me. All those swirling complexities have have managed to do is make sure I stay well away from the learning process, where what I should have been doing all along is given it a try.

I’m doing that now. Click the red words to see some of those I watched.

 

I’m also watching a lot of YouTube Videos related to Dreamweaver, and have subscribed to a few: a finicky guy, a serious techie, a focused online entrepreneur and fantastic teachers. Some are better than others, but I found myself liking tutors who were relatively inept at speaking, simply because everything they (finally managed to) say was new to me. Like this guy.

True to form, the field of web design has it’s fair share of kooks too. I found that people start to get weird and cranky when they talk about Internet marketing and Search-Engine Optimization. Why is that? This guy even gives his own phone number, because he’s stumbled on the magic formula to untold billions, yet seemed to be making the video on the way back from the toilet.

This young boy schooled me in the ways of Photoshop Brushes, which are available by the Gigabyte for free online. It’s a terrible trap to fall into, but it did reveal some more of the depth of the program to me, and I got a little distracted.

 

 

All in all, it’s been a pretty good day. I jumped into Dreamweaver and followed along, and my efforts after 1.5 days looks like this. The design will completely change. I’m still testing the whole concept like someone walking around in new shoes.

 

Sunday

Happy New Year. I danced around until about 5am, woke up at 3pm and thought that was enough dilly dallying, so it was off to Starbucks. I started this week’s task by speaking with Miyuki, the friend who is bravely setting up the salon. We spoke at length about her products (various kinds of treatments and massages), revised the packaging of them and looked at pricing structures (Please please pleeeeeease check out Priceless by William Poundstone). I say that like I’m an expert after reading one paperback. haha

We then looked at the function and content of the website. Her target market is women, and for the most part, women with expendable income and an intense interest in beauty. In Tokyo, especially around Ebisu, that is every second woman. That said, there are already a great host of Esthetic Salons around the traps, so it’ll be important to focus on attention to detail, and uncanny attention at that. Part of that will be the website.

It’s likely that these women will research their decisions on Social Networks, so strong linkage to Facebook and Mixi (the most famous Japanese variant) is important. The site will almost definitely be accessed by smartphones more than computers, but I need to learn to walk before I can run, so mobile detection and a separate mobile site is out of the question at this point. It does beg for simplicity and bite-size information, however.

Miyuki herself seems to be more focused on the practicalities of being a therapist. She has a reasonable idea about what she wants, but through the discussion, it was clear there were many unopened boxes in the room of creativity. It’s very satisfying to see someone get excited about their own services. A suggestion can lead to a completely new approach to the business. I suggested packaging multiple treatments, and we devised some unique approaches to this, including the idea of a “Beauty week”, which encompasses treatments, diet and advice spread over a luxuriant week.

The design of it will follow the theme of material I have already made for her stationary, with a few small tweaks. Here is an example of what has been done so far:

So it’s all soft and gentle, with candles and flowers. Unfortunately, this is has been done to death in the salons around here. It’s looking frightfully generic, but Miyuki insists that this is not a problem. My disagreement illustrated something important. Design and marketing is not the same the world over. That much is clear by how ridiculous some campaigns appear in Japan. However I feel about them, the reality is I am, in no way, the target market of a Salon like Acvo, so I should just bite my tongue and get on with it.

There is something a little pig-headed about the western assumption that psychology is the same worldwide. This deserves it’s own entry, but as a taster, I completely disagree that the so-called “Engrish” mistakes in Japanese advertising as mistakes at all. “Let’s Shopping!” is, in Japan, a strong slogan.

I will be keen on changing things up a little in any case, in the hope to portray Acvo as a standout salon. If the design’s cute enough, how could any self-respecting Japanese woman possibly resist?