Jill's musings

Holiday cards are always fun to make. Our card from last year caught many by surprise: it appeared that the Gu and Cao family had adopted a new family name, "Thompson". That was not what we had intended at all! What went wrong We were super behind in creating the card last year. In fact, I didn't get to it until well past January 1 of 2017 (gasp)! In a haste to get things done, the blunder happened, inevitably. I unknowingly agreed to the new family name Walgreen's had decided for us (or for all of its customers who happened to have selected the design).  Not until when I was holding a giant stack of cards that bore our proudest family photo of the year did I notice the the tiny print sneaking under the cheerful "Cheers", and it spelled T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N. Oh, no! I wasn't going to discard all the cards that I had just paid for so I had to fix it. After experimenting with a few variations, I settled on "The 'Thompson' Family" because...

One of my favorite books I read in 2016 is an interior design book named Styled: Secretes for Arranging Rooms from Tabletops to Bookshelves by Emily Henderson . The book is teeming with beautiful photos and amazing tips that can transform any space from boring to sophisticated. In this book, Emily encourages her readers to use a tray to hold small objects together. I tried, and it worked! Just look at how pulled-together my vanity l ooked after following this tip. And I can't help but wonder: what a magical tray! Interestingly, I came across something very similar while reading on a seemingly unrelated topic, web design, this time. In their book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design ,  Jason Beaird  and James George talk about the concept of proximity when considering  the composition of a web page. It's a pretty intuitive idea: in a composition, objects that are close to each other tend to be interpreted as a single unit by the viewer.   The p...