I always expect some radical shift in scenery when we cross a state border — the tall, thin trees of Georgia and Alabama and then, suddenly, in the space it takes to get through my entire Queen: Live at Wembley DVD (yes, I own it. Yes, it’s awesome), the Mississippi River is rolling along before us. Louisiana hits us with bright lights and casinos, an overuse of the “-eaux” spelling (for example, “Geaux” instead of “Go”, which I find embarrassingly superfluous). And after that, there’s no point in paying attention anymore, because Texas is a few miles ahead, and there’s nothing to see there that I haven’t already seen.

It disappoints me though, when states just fade into other states, when you cross a border and nothing changes — nothing noticeable. After some time, you might see mountains, which I always freak out about, but the sky doesn’t change colors. Weird animals don’t start popping up behind trees and chasing your car off of their ancestral land (Tennessee has a horrible problem with badgers cropping up in housing developments and chasing off the residents — I just thought you should know). There’s often little more than a welcome center (I’m keeping track of the good and bad ones — that was aimed at you, Alabama), a cluster of fast food places and gas stations, and then I-10 stretches out again like an endless road.

But I’m back! A week in Georgia, and a few days in Dallas, and tomorrow I’ll be back in Houston, hoping for fabled snow, and getting some work done at last. In the past week, I’ve read about six hundred pages (The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice, and The Gathering by Anne Enright), which makes me incredibly happy. There’s nothing better than being able to immerse yourself in a book all day, to read late into the night, and wake up dreaming about the characters. Except when they’re characters in an Irish tragedy, like The Gathering. That was an odd dream.

I’ve made a few adjustments to my test redesign, viewable here. I’m not sure how I feel about a tabbed menu. I think I’ve run that river dry, and the more I try to come back to it, the more banal it feels. They’re not even very interesting tabs. What makes them pretty at all is the fact that I threw in some rgba — which I have been using all over the place now, because it’s so versatile and easy — and, well, there you have it.

I’ve been down this road before though. I start out with an exciting! new! mockup, and gradually, I break it down to its composite bits, and by the time I’m done, the mockup is useless, and I make something completely different in a few minutes, and throw it up. It’s not even as much a matter of cowardice as it is a realization that I’m not inspired by my own work after a certain point. There has to be something new and sensational in me, something I only need one iteration of to make it a success.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think iterations are wonderful. I think everything needs to be thought over, until the pieces fit just so — it’s just that it’s so easy to over-think something as simple as a font or an icon that, until it is fixed, nothing seems right. So maybe my problem is minor. Maybe all this worrying about tabs and inspiration is unimportant, and I’ll wake up tomorrow, and everything will fall into place.

Other outlets

I thought about illustration as well. Being restricted to either hand-drawn art or illustrations I made with the selection tool in Photoshop — including the ones in my article about creationism and actual science. For example, I made this piggy, which I think is a pretty fancy piggy. But it doesn’t come close enough to standing for the site as a whole.

Unless I make a site about piggies. Now, there’s a possibility…

I suppose I haven’t ever gone far to brand myself visually. Colors are colors, Archer is Archer (and it didn’t even make it into the last design. It didn’t seem to fit). There’s still a long road ahead of me, but I think I can make it work.

Here I go. Version three.