Creative gift wrapping

Three years ago (boy, is my blog old!) I blogged about some creative gift wrappings. Well, it's that time of the year soon and people are publishing many more great and innovative ideas.

Country Living has fun with tape:


How About Orange explains how to make a gift bow from a magazine page:


Mondo Cherry has fun with aluminum foil:


Real Simple features, among other ideas, a ribbon with holes:


Design Sponge replaced the classical bow with a pom pom:


Even more ideas are featured at Squidoo.com - check it out!

Moving day at the office, or how the geek works

Lifehacker recently posted Nine Workspaces Where Famous Folks Get Stuff Done: Al Gore's, Bill Gate's, Steve Ballmer's, Steve Jobs'... Nine - isn't one missing? Of course one is! Mine.

My office actually moved last week, so I used this opportunity to take pictures without being considered crazy (just sentimental). So here it goes.

Before:


During:


After:


(If you're wondering about the pink ribbon on my chair, it was a way of labelling it to make sure the movers didn't give it to one of the guys.)

Christmas is coming

Christmas is coming! And I noticed just now! Why? Pobably because I don't watch TV, don't go out much, and these weeks, if I ever went out, it was to school, and I didn't get to see many christmas lights on my way.
I started my gift shopping last wednesday. It was quite a challenge: a boyfriend and three brothers, two of wich I hadn't brought birthday presents during the last two months! However, I am lucky only to have one lecture on wednesdays, so I went shopping at 10 a.m., when the shops aren't crowded yet (and you gotta know it's tough this year, every shop lacks employees, after so many people emigrated to the United Kindgom), and brought almost everything I needed. Well, it was sweets in most cases, but I just couldn't really go for personalized gifts when this operating systems lab got me tortured untill the last minute (it was due on 9:30 a.m. and i stayed up untill 7 and typed!).
My shopping went on the next day, as my friend needed to hit the mall. This shopping session was more selfish, and I left the mall with the new Amy MacDonald album, coloured tights and two new ribbons for myself, as well as lots of medecines for my family, who is generously sharing all the viruses avaliable out there.
Anyway, I got my gifts, it's wrapping time. LifeHacker (again!) lead me to a site with great wrapping ideas: WrapArt.
One of my favourite ideas from the site are drawn ribons:
Why don't real-life bows ever look that impressive?
Next, marker strokes: so easy and simple, yet really elegant:


And last, collages. The site features lots of collages and most of them don't look impressive, but these do:


Isn't it a great way to use wrapping paper leftovers?
Okay, gotta go and wrap my own presents now.

Ribbons in webdesign

I suffer of an unexplainable ribbon obsession. See the pic on the side: what's in my hair?
(Well, to be honest, I haven't worn ribbons in my hair for quite a while, as I don't really care what I look like while coding, and last week was all about coding... but I love ribbons, the more colorful the better. )



So naturally, I incorporated ribbons into the design of my personal website. Today, I ran across another website with ribbons in the design: www.splittheatom.co.uk (it was featured on SmashingMagazine, which the geek used to read on a regular basis). I really like how colorful ribbons have been used for the navigation and frankly, I am a bit surprised that I don't see ribbons on websites more often (contrary to pieces of paper). Well, there's an area to explore. If
you're interested, here's a nice tutorial about creating ribbons in a graphic editor.