Coffee Making

So one thing I’ve slowly learned while being here is the art of making coffee.  I personally am not a coffee drinker, but I’ve had to prepare the brew for my fellow coworkers on many the occasion while working here.  Sometimes I’ll be complimented for making good coffee while other times, I’ll be told it could have been better.

But I honestly can’t tell the difference.  Good coffee, bad coffee.  It all tastes like bitter hatred to me.  I try to avoid the substance as much as possible, and will only resort to drinking it if I’m especially out of it that day, and even then it’s usually half creamer, half coffee, so it might as well not be coffee at all.

Last Thursday, however, I did try a cup without anything added.  It was disgusting, but somehow the putrid flavor helped to fuel my design prowess.  I was able to discover some new techniques for our web designs that I hadn’t thought of using before, as if my brain were trying to ignore the vileness of the coffee and focus on the design.   I don’t feel I’ve been able to pull of a mostly white design before now (since white designs tend to be pretty overdone, it’s difficult to do anything that feels fresh).  What I did was I placed a very subtle texture in the background with its opacity set to %16.  I added a cover overlay effect to it as well in order to remove the color, and make it a very pleasant gray that doesn’t compete with the rest of the design, but it also breaks up the background just enough to keep it from being flat and boring.  Textures are just one of those tricky things that I don’t feel enough designers take advantage of since it’s pretty easy to destroy a design if you choose the wrong texture.  But when used properly, they can make the difference between a design that feels dull and one that feels complete and whole.