Posts
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Lightning Palette - A Quick, Usable, Color Scheme Generator
Overview
Lightning Palette is a simple web app with a simple purpose – allow anyone to create a harmonius color scheme at the press of a button, regardless of whether they have a background in color theory or design.
Technology Used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (ES6), MaterializeCSS
Context
Let’s imagine a man named Aaron, the owner of a small shop that sells exotic cheese to well-off customers. He knows a lot about cheese, but not much about design or color theory. Despite this, he’s looking to revamp his social media presence, and part of that is making a logo for himself.
After a few false starts, Aaron draws up a dapper cheese wheel that he’s happy with using to brand his shop. Unfortunately, when it comes to add color, he quickly finds that creating a harmonius color scheme isn’t as easy as just choosing his three favorite colors. Perhaps he looks up some tips and sees something about complementary colors. “Complementary” sounds like a good thing right? He tries a few complementary combos and is dismayed to find that, while visually exciting, they make his store look more like a sports bar than a sophisticated cheese store.
For someone like Aaron who’s unfamiliar with color theory finding a combination of colors that look good together can be frustrating. The goal of Lightning Palette is to abstract those frustrations away behind theming descriptions that are easy for anybody to understand.
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The Panasonic Prestige Microwave and My Programming Paradigm
A few weeks ago, a new microwave appeared in the break room of the office I work at. It had a rather highfalutin name: The Genius Prestige. While I’m not sure it deserves such a fancy title, it has one peculiar feature. Instead of the numberpad of a standard non-prestigious microwave, it has a single dial. Usually, I’m a big proponent for keeping interfaces standardized. There’s no need to introduce a gimmick to an interface that people have been using for their entire lives.
However, in this case, the way the dial is implemented was incredibly clever.
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From My Notebook: Object Oriented Programming vs Functional Programming
Like most recently graduated programmers, I’ve spent most of my time learning and working within the object oriented programming paradigm. Classes I took at UCI touched on concepts of functional programming, but at the end of the day it has always come back to OOP. In my mind, OOP was just “regular” programming, and functional programming was some odd-ball topic to be explored another day. Well, that day is today.
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My First JS Meetup
As part of my ongoing effort to become more involved in the web development community, I attended my first meetup this evening. It was hosted by the South Bay & OC Chapter of JavaScriptLA. Tonight, web dev bootcamp (LearningFuze) instructor Scott Bowler gave a talk on Best Practices Within React.
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Blog Restyle
I took some time this week to dive into Jekyll and restyle the blog portion of my site to make the entire thing feel more cohesive.
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We're Live!
Welcome to my dev blog! There’s still a lot of work to be done, but everything is up and running. Right now I’ve made myself a brand new personal page (okay, it’s just a prettier version of my résumé) and a blog to go along with it.
How was it made?
Sass
My personal page is about as simple as it gets, as far as technology goes. The whole reason I wanted to create one in the first place was to practice my fundamentals in some kind of small self-contained project. The entire thing is done in plain ol’ HTML and CSS, although I did dip my toes into Sass for the first time! I’d read so much about the merits of using a CSS preprocessor, and I figured this would be a good time to give it a try. I mostly found it helpful in relatively straightforward use cases, such as creating an easy-to-reference color palette or cleaning up clutter by nesting selectors. There’s so much of the language that I didn’t utilize, so I’m definitely excited to dive deeper the next time I use it.
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