Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

The new issue of Wild Violet is up, a special double issue encompassing everything that would have been in both a spring and a summer issue. We did it this way because the web designer/art editor was getting married this summer and actually was having two weddings: a Hindu wedding for her groom's family and a Catholic wedding for hers.

As you can imagine, planning these weddings was a huge undertaking. So we thought a double issue would make it easier on us both.

As she was finishing up the design, she informed me that she'd done a lot of thinking and that she was going to step down from Wild Violet to focus on her own projects. Plus, she said to me that, even though we cofounded it, "It's really your baby."

After the initial shock, I told her that of course, I understood. I began to ponder how I was going to keep the magazine going and keep the same high quality of design.

Now, I'd already been doing most of the internal pages, and I was the one who designed the graphics that went with each individual poem or story. But she would always design the overall theme for the issue, the style sheet, the art section and the index pages.

Her skills go far beyond mine in terms of using such things as Flash graphics and Javascript. I'm a HTML girl, myself. I crash around in Dreamweaver fairly respectably.

But as I cast around in my head for another friend or associate to bring in as web designer, I realized that there were ways to make it look good without a lot of flashy programming. Why didn't I just do it on my own?

So on the way down to Baltimore last weekend for the Otakon meeting, I talked to The Gryphon about my design ideas. As he was listening to me, he'd ask me questions and suggest ways to do it more efficiently, including some sort of program which would automatically take information and create pages to specification. The pages could be tweaked off-line before uploading.

The idea sounded great but sounded like it would involve a lot of learning and experimenting. I wanted to put my efforts into the creative aspect of the design. "Do you want to be my web master?" I asked him.

Without hesitation, he said he would. So he's begun experimenting with style sheets and says he'll write a program for me and help me with the design each issue. I will be the creative force, choosing images and color schemes. He'll make it work.

We're also going to play around with site design and making navigation more user friendly.

If she had to step down, this was the best time. Our next issue, coming out in October, will mark the third anniversary of Wild Violet. As we start our fourth volume, that will be the best design. So it seems that, like many life changes, a change which initially seemed negative will turn out to be a good thing. I'm sure that with The Gryphon's help, we'll turn this into a well-oiled machine and the new volume will kick off with a fresh, new look.

Copyright 2004 by Alyce Wilson

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