For the last few weeks, I’ve been help­ing out with the design of Hand­made Col­orado. This is an exhi­bi­tion at Den­ver Inter­na­tional Air­port fea­tur­ing crafters and artists from through­out the state. It has been an immensely fun project! They have some really amaz­ing stuff in those cases… I am def­i­nitely putting a Valen­tich bag on my wish list. The exhi­bi­tion pho­tos I took (after a 5-hour flight! And at night!) turned out ter­ri­bly, but when I have some I will post them here.

I’ve also been upping my web design skills with this project. I have been study­ing HTML & CSS for the last year, but feel like I have dou­bled my knowl­edge of these sub­jects in the last three weeks. As the exhi­bi­tion has a QR code, many peo­ple will (hope­fully) be inter­act­ing with the site on their mobile devices. So I learned how to cre­ate a respon­sive web design that can be scaled up or down depend­ing on the user’s screen size.

The new site was uploaded today, and I hope peo­ple enjoy inter­act­ing with it. But there is no rest in my future… we are plan­ning a more expan­sive (WordPress-powered) site that has con­tent from the par­tic­i­pants them­selves. I have some expe­ri­ence with Word­Press with this site, but cre­at­ing, or even doing a decent job of cus­tomiz­ing, a WP theme is a huge under­tak­ing. I have been study­ing, learn­ing, exper­i­ment­ing and work­ing day and night on this. I first learned HTML in 1999 and it has been absolutely astound­ing to me how much more com­pli­cated web design is now in 2012. Back then, I loved exper­i­ment­ing with lay­out and image maps (remem­ber them?). I’d love to get my skillset up to the level where I feel like I am play­ing, rather than try­ing to solve a problem.