Perhaps I'm too simple a man, but occasionally, when I put in my earphones, it's amazing how the entire room seems to be filled with music.

And although it's fairly easy to realize that when another person walks into the same space, they aren't greeted by a roomful of music, I wonder how many other times I enter a situation with my 'earphones' on - with my mind attuned to seeing things differently than they actually are. Not to suggest, of course, that other people don't have their earphones in as well, but it just goes to show how the human experience comes together the way it does - why conflicts are so hard to resolve sometimes, why other people are so different... and maybe why it's so rewarding to bump into someone playing the same song you've got on.

Attempted a hypothetical setup for the African organization on my club's campus this morning. It's still very, very bare, and experienced designers will probably scoff at this amateur effort, but I think it's a decent start. 

Here's the page as it should open:

And then what it should look like when one of the side bar's links is selected:

Will be finishing up mockups of the more interesting pages (read: adding pictures), and then looking up psd-html tutorials to try and bring this beast to life. Let's hope it doesn't end up like Frankenstein's experiment.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, I borrowed heavily from what already existed: layout, color scheme, and general idea were basically a clone of yaleootb's excellent website, which my friend Emmanuel had a huge part in designing. You should probably visit his blog here.

Credits for the club logo design to the venerable @We_hay.

As always, comments, suggestions, and general insults welcomed.

A brief history: Illustrator only came to my laptop this summer - my dad acquired the corporate license for his office a couple of years ago, and while I have always had massive respect for the gentlemen in his publishing house's graphics department, I decided to find out whether the tools of their trade could be utilised by mere mortals - an idea fueled, perhaps, by the Greek myths I've been reading for a classics course this semester. Thankfully, unlike Phaethon, my attempts didn't end in total and utter destruction; though I admittedly have a very, very long way to go, I'll hazard the opinion that these early efforts aren't wholly unsightly.

Below are two attempts to reproduce Apple's logo with the 'pen' tool alone. On the left is yesterday's effort, the right, this afternoon's. The near-circles around the logos are just reference points by which to judge my (lack of) proficiency at making stuff with this program, as a whole.

"What's her name?" I probed.

I grimaced as she massaged my leg.

"Celine," she said finally.

"Name her after a celebrity?"

She shot me an incredulous look. "No."

A couple of moments later, she continued, "I just thought it was a nice name. It came to me at the time, so I named her Celine."

"A very straightforward way of doing things," I noted.

"Flip over," she said by way of response. I did.

She began to massage the back of my thigh, her glove making a slapping sound wholly inappropriate to the question I wanted to ask next, which was whether or not she was married.

"How old is she?" I asked instead.

"Seven," she said simply. Perhaps realising it was a rather curt response, she added, "She's a big girl now."

What could one say to that? I tried to focus my mind on not clenching my butt muscles.

"So yes, I'm old," she said. "I can see you thinking about it."

I laughed. "I knew the question was transparent, but I still had to ask."

I grimaced again - the pressure from the ball of her thumb pinched on a nerve. She took no notice. What was school like with a kid? How'd you do it?, I wanted to ask. Nah, too personal, I thought. How about where she went to med-

"So what direction are you heading? What do you plan to be?" she said finally.

"Rich," I said, trying to be cute. It got a brief laugh out of her, but I knew she immediately docked my age a couple of years for giving such an immature answer.

"And how do you plan to get there?" she asked, a little patronisingly. Karate-chopping the side of my thigh now.

"Well, I'm an English major-"

"I had guessed that already," she said impatiently. "Book gave it away."

"-but the journalism industry in the US is collapsing, and the journalism industry in Ghana" - she snickered - "the journalism industry in Ghana isn't particularly respectable-"

"Terrible reporting," she interjected, her hand pausing unconsciously between my thigh for a second. "Terrible, she said again.

"- so I plan to go into web design; many things I've read and people I've talked to think it's a good idea to get into a business when there aren't any established players in it yet." I was warming up to this topic. Many a time had dinner gone cold as extended daydreamed interviews played out in my mind. This was always the fifth or sixth question.

"What do you mean? I don't understand..."

I beamed under the pillow. I had started forming my next answer before she even asked. "Ok," I said, pretending to be creating the metaphor as I spoke. I paused a split second for effect. "Think about the internet in Ghana as real estate. There's no established company in Ghana that designs websites for corporations - there's no Trassaco Valley, or Emefs Estates. I want to be that company. There's a huge opportunity for Ghana to grow online, and I want to be a part of that. And setting up the infrastructure opens up the doors to so many other things. Ghanaians haven't yet been programmed to expect things free from the internet. Spearheading the expansion of the web in Ghana, I can avoid the mistakes that companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post made, and condition people to expect to pay for their online news like any newspaper. I want to own the land, build the houses."

She slapped and chopped her way down my leg, moving down to my calves before she spoke again, slowly. "I think that's a great idea."

I wondered if she could see me still smiling from behind. I wasn't done yet. "But then again, I'm not sure if Ghanaians are ready for the" - "On your side", she commanded - "for the shift. I wonder if they're ready for this sort of move yet. There's no point building the houses if there's no-one ready to live in them yet." I paused, unsure where to go next, but she saved me with her next sentence.

"Do you feel pain when I do this," she said, twisting my knee this way, then that, "or that?". That, I responded. Was she tired of hearing about the internet?

"Well, I think you'll succeed."

"Thanks."

"We're all done; that'll be 50 cedis."

I sat up and handed her the money. "Thanks again."

"Welcome."

I hopped off the table and began putting on my jeans, sad the conversation was over so soon. I wanted to know how she had done med school AND raised a daughter. Was I the only one who enjoyed the conversation?

"So when will you be coming again?" she asked.

"Tomorrow."

I bent over, pulling on my socks, then shoes. I realised she was still standing there. What was she thinking?

I straightened up and pulled my shirt over my head, moving slowly in the hope she would say something else. But by the time I had finished straightening it out, she was still silent.

I turned to go out of the door, feeling a little let down.

"Say hi to your mother for me", she said at last.

"Will do," I said, feeling foolish immediately after. Will do? Who says that?

She smiled sweetly. "See you tomorrow."

"See you."

What should have been a brain-numbingly simple exercise to find the perfect Mac version of Photoshop's earliest ancestor - Windows 'Paint', the 344 kilobyte emblem of simplicity at its best - quickly became a full-out expedition to discover if any such thing actually existed.

The above is what I wanted. Instead, I scoured google results and found a number of options, and to prevent you, kind reader and probable mac user, from wasting your time and brain cells doing the same, I'm going to give a brief review of the spoils.

My options were limited by having an empty wallet, slow internet speeds, and limited patience, so paid applications and large ones went out the window. Besides, Paint is free, and is only 344kb, so all other apps only had half a chance of making the cut to begin with. I assessed all the apps - Rita, Paintbrush, Tux Paint* and Scribbles - on three criteria - Ease of Use, Presence of Basic Features, and Speed, in line with what I took to be Paint's strongest points.

Conclusion? Rita and Paintbrush offer the most functionality, even though they have their slight limitations, but Scribbles and Tux Paint* only shine if you have a 3-year old nephew you don't mind playing with your thousand dollar laptop.

*Turns out Tux Paint really IS for kids, so don't be surprised when your 3-year old nephew requests that in particular. Review for Tux Paint was redacted upon this finding.

Longer explanations and impressions of apps below:

 

Scribbles

Currently residing in my Trash Bin awaiting a quick and painless death, Scribbles was the least useful app of the lot. Designers Atebits made the brilliant, brilliant Tweetie (available for both iPhone and mac), but missed the mark quite substantially here. Though quick to start up, Scribbles brought little to the table in terms of features. No proper cut/copy and paste, no 'smart select' option, no allowance for text input, colour palette was difficult figure out.. this app had nothing. Unpaid version only allowed for pictures to be saved in '.ptn' format, which, of course, only Scribbles could open. Attempt exporting to any other format, and image quality is quickly compromised - the atebits watermark remaining is a particularly irritating reminder of Scribbles' failure to perform.

Highlights were the different kinds of erasers possible (from top: 'soft', 'medium', and 'hard'), which could possibly be utilised cleverly to achieve something...

but even that failed to make a lasting impression. The single other interesting feature was the 'tracing paper' view option, which allowed one to draw on the desktop -  a potentially useful tool given the right circumstance - but like real tracing paper, it didn't save with the background. No digital advantages to a pen and paper here, folks. Perhaps useful when making video tutorials, but not for much else..

This application was disappointing as a whole. Anyone with a lot of time on their hands could probably make something vaguely artistic with this, but in that time they'd have made something truly amazing with the original Paint.exe.

Ease of Use: 3.5/5.

Presence of Basic Features: 1/5.

Speed: 5/5.

 

Paintbrush

A clear knockoff of the original with nearly all of the original's features - including a near-identical toolbox - Paintbrush made a strong showing during my short employment of its services. But alas, it was a minor failing that crippled the realization of my image. I wanted to write some text and rotate it a few degrees to fit across a defined space, but Paintbrush didn't have the flexibility to rotate text - or anything else, I discovered - to degrees other than square angles; 90, 180 and 270. Still, it's a quick, handy tool for minor image editing, easy to use yet powerful enough to take on the task at hand. Provided you don't need anything at an odd angle, that is. Excellent application.

Ease of Use: 4.5/5

Presence of Basic Features: 4/5

Speed: 5/5.

 

Rita

A rather unfortunately named application, with an equally poorly advised icon, Rita makes up for these minor faults in sheer usability. It did most of what I wanted, and in fact included a nifty optinal feature whereby it smoothed out jaggedly drawn lines into smoother, more aesthetically pleasing curves, with the level of correction easily chosen by the user. This feature worked perfectly to my ends, and I exploited it shamelessly. Cut/Copy and Paste worked wonderfully, and while the colour palette was cumbersome to work around, some of the other features more than compensated. Minor shortcoming - default save format was '.rita', but the option to export to other formats were available on the 'File' menu as well. A bit of fidelity loss here as well, but you can't expect a free app to give you everything. A great app on the whole.

Ease of Use: 4/5

Presence of Basic Features: 4.5/5

Speed: 4.5/5.

 

Concluding words

 Rita and PaintBrush clearly performed better than all the others, with Rita slightly edging Paintbrush due to the handy correction feature.

Oh, and the other one? Hazel is probably taking the trash out as we speak.

Quite frankly, these days, the call to writing only sounds very vaguely in my ear, when I hear it at all.

And then when I do hear its feeble call, I hear different languages. That cannot be spoken with the same tongue, pen, or touch-sensitive keyboard.

There are the serious African blogs, detailing the woes of our continent, the corruption of our leaders, downplaying it’s well-publicised misfortunes, and making plans to move forward.

And then there’s the kind I’ve always wanted to make – the witty, utterly readable, instantly likeable lean-in-close-lemme-talk-to-you-like-a-brotha blogs, with anecdotes, pictures, sounds, life.

Is it possible to marry the two?

There has to be a sort of place in the blogging world for someone such as myself. A place to sprawl all over with random suggestions and notices, yet still retain the dignity to write something serious about a worrying contemporary issue.

And what do I name it? What name do I put under my posts? What persona do I assume? What writing style? And what viewpoints? My own, or those I think will entertain?

Should I be doing this at all? Isn’t revelation supposed to strike one all of a sudden, with no room left for speculation, doubt, or hesitation? Shouldn’t I be in a feverish despair to find an exit for my emotions, through words? What is this languid half-concern? I find so many of my interests only fleeting...

Am I even supposed to be a writer, or this is pathetic and forced?

Just because you can speak English decently doesn’t make you a writer.

I’ve struggled forever to place my dislike of ‘traditionally’ Ghanaian
advertisements. I would go on to describe what your traditionally
Ghanaian ad was, but therein lies the issue.
I’ve settled, however, on claiming that what Ghanaian ads lack is an
appreciation of the nuance. Everything is so blatantly and
unapologetically stated, as though the director of the video didn’t
trust you to ‘get’ it. The entire production comes ready-chewed and
tasteless, and is forced down your throat, again and again, and again,
and the mental teeth we went to school to mature waste away for lack
of use.

People like to be flattered, and using nuances in your video does
exactly that. Make vague references to things that only they think
they know, or will notice. Use an easygoing, relaxed font when you’re
giving the address to that trendy new boutique. Slip in a soccer
reference here and there, without outfitting everyone in the ad in a
referee’s attire, complete with the stern look, board-stiff posture,
and forbidding whistle. Poke a little harmless fun – with a carefully
selected word or two – at a well-known political gaffe, at a
horrendous sporting error recently made, at a rumour making the rounds
on the grapevine. Titillate us. Gossip with us. We want to feel like
your ad is actually a conversation, with a little afterthought at the
end after you’ve connected with at the end: oh yeah, and try this
thing that worked for me. We want to share the meal with you. Don’t
just sit and feed it to us. The overdone sounds of contentment from
the kids heading off to school in the morning, the perfect family
sitting at the table enjoying three-course meals that presumably
spring complete from the can? How convincing! I can just see families
flocking to buy this stuff! Of COURSE it works this way!

Make them feel like you’re with them on this. You know the things they
do. You understand them. You have similar interests. Tell them you ARE
them, and you like this product, so why shouldn’t they?

arguably the chief critic of clumsy user interfaces, I have given in to the pressure and registered for a site here... I expect this to be pretty good.

Let's see if the experience will be seamless enough to make me want to do this again.

Until later, perhaps:
Agyarek