Tag Archives: advice

Monday in the HTMLab

Icons Are Like Candy

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iconslikecandy
Due largely to the advent of apps, many webdesigners are choosing to do more of their site’s navigation with the help of icons rather than text. After all, doesn’t it look so much cleaner just to use an icon in place for an RSS feed, or for a Twitter account, than to spell out “RSS Feed” or “Twitter” in text?

Well, yes and no. Icons can look clean and tidy–that is, until you have tons of them on the page. Too many icons can make your site look more like somebody’s cluttered desktop. Plus, if every single navigation link on your page is an icon, users can get easily confused about what to click or tap to navigate your site.

Just like candy, small doses of icons are best, so that your design looks sleek and doesn’t suffer from icon overload. But how many icons is too many? It really depends on how you organize them on the page. See below!

Think carefully about where you place and arrange your icons.

Considering your layout, how and where would your icons be best placed? For some layouts, a small table of icons might work best if you only have a tiny bit of space on your sidebar, in your header, or in your footer in which to display them–see an example below:

But if you have a small strip of space across the top or along the side of your content, you can place icons there, as seen below:


Horizontally-aligned icons can look cool as part of a navigation bar…

…and vertically-aligned icons can look neat on a sidebar.

Give at least 10px of space between your icons.


Visual spacing around your icons is hugely important. Whether you choose to arrange them in a table, like the example above, or whether you choose a vertical or horizontal strip, leave a bit of space around them. This will prevent them looking all crowded together and unreadable. The icons in my example above are spaced 10px apart, giving each one enough space to be clicked on and understood as separate entities.

Be ready to reduce the number of icons.

Take a hard look at all your icons–if they’re collectively taking up at least 200px of vertical/horizontal space, you might have too many. One way I get around this design issue is to design my icons’ display, leave it alone on my hard drive for a few days, and then come back to it with fresh eyes. With time away from it, I can better tell if there are too many even to my eyes. In that case, I pick out the most important ones (the ones I really want my visitors to click on) and put the rest on another page, well-spaced. Try this–your users’ eyes will thank you!

Make use of alt and title text.

For some layouts, you may not want the added clutter of text displaying every time you hover over an icon. For that, you can use alt text in the <img> tag and title text in the <a> tag to stand in for the text hover labels I showed how to do earlier. See how the alt and title text works in the icon table, below:

(Optional) Make a text “hover label” for each icon.

Whether you choose to do a mouse cursor hover effect for desktop users, or a “tap-to-reveal-text” effect for mobile users, it’s important to make it clear exactly what the icon represents before your visitor clicks on it.

There are plenty of dynamic script-heavy ways to do this (like using Foundation), but if you want to label your icons the old-fashioned way, here’s my hack:

1. Put link text below each icon; make the a:link and a:visited text color the same as the background color, and make the a:hover text color a strongly-contrasted color, like the examples below:


For this, I put each icon into its own table cell, and then put a line break between image and text within the link, like so:

<td valign=”top”><a href=”http://www.facebook.com/”><img src=”facebook.png” border=”0″>

<br>facebook</a></td>


For this example, I gave each icon its own table cell and row, and just put a few non-breaking spaces between linked image and linked text, like this:

<tr><td valign=”top”><a href=”http://www.facebook.com/”>

<img src=”facebook.png” border=”0″>&nbsp;&nbsp;facebook</a></td></tr>

Remember that you can have multiple lines of text displaying underneath or to the side of your icons in this format (just using HTML line breaks), as shown below:

The size of your icons is your choice–but think it through!

Icon size is a personal choice, but it also depends on the grandness of the layout you’re designing. If you have a very simple layout, small icons might look sufficiently different enough for users to notice them; if you have a very detailed, graphics-intensive layout, you’ll likely want bigger icons so that they stand out more.

(Also, for responsive layouts meant for mobile designs, big icons are easier for fingers to tap. This message brought to you by a girl with big fingertips. :D)

Summary

Adding icons as part of your site’s navigation is up to you–just remember that a few pieces of icon “candy” go very far on a web design!

Saturday with the Spark

Piano Playing: Easy to Start, Hard to Master

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pianoplaying
Pianos can express such a wonderful range of emotions. Even before I started taking piano lessons at the age of 10, I had already heard for myself how a master pianist can make the simplest melody or chord progression absolutely gorgeous, just with the way he or she strikes the key–and I bemoaned my own inability to match this effortless grace in my early days of training. A pianist can glide across notes of joy, bang out a song of anger, sound soft sorrowful tones, strike quick, fearful notes, and even create the warm resonation of love–but it takes the knowledge of how intensely to strike the keys so that they give the right effect.

This makes the piano one of the most difficult instruments to master, in my opinion–and this comes from somebody who can’t wrap her head around the guitar or violin!  It takes a real “feel” of the music to make the piano express an emotion.

Bad Playing vs. Good Playing: It’s All a Matter of Feeling


The above video is an auditory example of “bad playing” (mechanical, passionless, choppy somehow too strict on timing) as contrasted with “good playing” (flowing, passionate, human, slightly improvised timing). While it is important to stay in tempo, especially when playing in concert with others, there’s a decided lack of feeling when you try to adhere so close to the tempo that you become almost robotic.


This video, one of my favorite video game music arrangements for piano, shows how passionate playing can still be in tempo but express emotion. Slight rubatos here and there, harder strikes on the keys sharply contrasted with softer, gliding strokes, and the ability to let the melody ring out above the chords is what grabs me about this video–but what do you think?

If You’re Just Starting Piano: Some Tips

  • Don’t be disheartened when you begin learning piano–you’re not going to sound like a master overnight.
  • Listen to many different experienced pianists play, determine what you like and don’t like about their playing style, and then develop your own taste from that. Just like all other forms of music, everyone’s got their own style!
  • Find sheet music for songs you absolutely love–that will make the “feeling music” part much, much easier to learn!
  • Practice your pieces so that you know the rhythms and pitches inside out…then, allow yourself to slow down and speed up the tempo, just a bit.
  • Listen to the melody of a song as it’s played. Which notes are louder? Which notes are barely there? Would you play it the same way, or would you stress different notes?

Summary

Piano can seem easy to learn at first and then startlingly difficult–but it can be mastered! Just be willing to feel the music rather than just play it, and you’re halfway there!

Thursday in the Zone

Building with Wildcards

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buildingwithwildcards
As a longtime HeroClix player, I’ve already found a few favorite team abilities (see my post about Mystics here), but I also enjoy passing around such abilities to characters who wouldn’t necessarily have it. Thus, the Wildcard team abilities–any one of the six symbols below means that the piece can share many different team abilities.

Why Wildcards Are Awesome

Wildcards sharing abilities can become game-changing very quickly. For instance, 77-point Spider-Girl can borrow the Mystics team ability from Jason Blood and start damaging her attackers every time they hurt her, too. Borrowing an Avenger’s free move ability increases team mobility if you’ve got a lot of Wildcards to move around, and passing around better attack values courtesy of Bat-Enemy team can make even your second-string Wildcards good for something!

In essence, Wildcards can help round out your team–if you have a lot of ranged S.H.I.E.L.D. pieces, for instance, and you need a little close-combat to help them out, you can easily include a wildcard close-combat piece like Timber Wolf or Iron Fist to give you another person to help you kick up range or damage without being as squishy as your range pieces.

Some Caveats to Remember

  • When selecting team abilities, choose one aggressive or movement TA and one defensive–such as Bat-Enemy and Danger Girl, Avengers and Mystics, or Ultimates and Bat-Ally. That way, you can wildcard to the aggressive TA during your turn, and then wildcard to the defensive one when it’s your opponent’s turn.
  • Choose your team-ability-bearing pieces wisely–make sure they can defend themselves if your opponent tries to attack them first. POGs with TAs are notoriously fragile and shouldn’t be relied on as the sole source of a TA.

Some Aggressive Team Abilities

  • Ultimates, Superman-Ally, Avengers Initiative
  • Ultimate X-Men, 2000 AD
  • Batman-Enemy, Sinister Syndicate
  • S.H.I.E.L.D.
  • HYDRA, Police, Morlocks
  • Masters of Evil
  • Injustice League

Some Defensive Team Abilities

  • Mystics, Arachnos, CrossGen
  • Batman-Ally, Kabuki
  • Defenders, Justice Society of America, Alternate Team Ability Fantastic Four
  • Teen Titans, X-Men
  • Hypertime, Kingdom Come

Some Movement Team Abilities

  • Green Lantern Corps
  • Avengers, Justice League of America, Brotherhood of Mutants, Top Cow
  • Serpent Society

Team Abilities That Aren’t Worth It For Wildcards:

  • Crime Syndicate (easier just to use a Wildcard with Prob naturally on the dial)
  • Superman-Enemy (hard to set up, easy to destroy)
  • Crusades (very situational and doesn’t come up often enough.)
  • Guardians of the Globe (again, very situational.)
  • Suicide Squad (ideally, your Wildcards shouldn’t be dying…easier to use X-Team or Teen Titans for healing)
  • Regular Fantastic Four (doesn’t work when a wildcard dies)

Watch Out for Uncopyable Team Abilities!

TAs like Power Cosmic, Quintessence, and Outsiders can’t be copied by Wildcards–check the Player’s Guide list of Team Abilities before you build a wildcard team, just to make sure your selected team is actually legal!

Try Out Your Own Combos!

The Wildcard team building strategy is all about customization–trying all sorts of Wildcard characters and combos of TAs until you find what you like. Start off by adding a few different Wildcards to your favorite team, and see what happens!

Tuesday on the Soapbox

Zumba: Yes, It IS A Workout

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zumbaworkout
After months of trying to get healthy on my own, I had just about had it with workout plans that read “Do 10 reps of this, 20 reps of this, walk 10 laps on this,” etc. I was bored, bored, BORED of typical workouts and typical workout routines.

So, when a friend of mine from the local Choral Society spoke well of the Zumba class she took on Thursday nights, I was intrigued, but also very wary. Wasn’t Zumba that thing from the infomercial, with all the Latin dance moves and such?


I researched as much as I could online, watching videos like the one above, getting more interested…but I still thought it surely couldn’t work as well as it purported to. I had done enough dance and musical theater in my childhood and teen years to know that dance could engage the entire body, but I still worried–if it was too easy, it wouldn’t do much for me, and if it was too hard, I risked re-injuring a lot of my lower body.

Finally, I put doubts to the side and came to watch a Thursday evening class…and by the middle of the class, I wanted to join in. It seemed like a LOT of fun, and the music was very bouncy and great to listen to. Quickly, I made plans to try the class out, and the next available Thursday evening (June 16th, 2011), I actually did try it.

Takeaways from My First Zumba Class

  • If you mess up, you are probably not the only one messing up–even the instructor missteps occasionally! Laugh and keep going.
  • The high-energy music wordlessly encourages you to keep going.
  • Zumba is definitely not too easy. The moves are challenging, the tempo is fairly quick, and you will definitely find muscles you forgot you had. LOL!
  • If you haven’t exercised in a long time and still try to do everything just like the instructor does, you are going to hurt yourself. 😛
  • You can always modify the moves to suit your level of fitness.
  • It’s not a competition–do what you can and try to get a little better every time.

My Results During and After Class

After the first 20 minutes of class, I was already sweating like a hog in that air-conditioned room, and by the end of the hour-long workout, I felt accomplished, if not exhilarated. (I still don’t think my body releases endorphins when I exercise…I think it releases the opposite, ’cause I usually feel like gum scraped off somebody’s shoe after I work out.)

Now, I did have to take a couple of short rests in addition to the rests between songs, because my heart rate felt like it was starting to speed out of control. However, once I started modifying the moves and not trying to do absolutely everything the instructor was doing, I felt my heart rate kick into a higher (but much more controllable) level. For sure, I didn’t feel like I was going to keel over again.

I have never felt my heart get into that comfortable-higher gear before–usually it goes straight from “Resting” level to “LOL I’M COMING THROUGH YOUR RIBS”, with painful gasping for air included. Instead, the new heart rate was definitely faster than normal, but not scary-fast. My exertional asthma, which had triggered twice within the first 20 minutes, had all but vanished by the end of the hour as well. This was AMAZING! Not to mention that modifying the moves to exclude jumping, leg twists, and deep knee bends protected my knees from further damage and left me less sore the next day.

Summary

The best thing about Zumba is that you aren’t required to do every single move perfectly. It’s a “work-at-your-own-pace” type of exercise, with camaraderie and laughter included–which means it’s approachable for beginners and yet it can be high-intensity for people who are already fit. Doing Zumba doesn’t mean you’ll drop 100 pounds in a week or get ripped abs in 2 months, but you will see greater stamina, flexibility, and some toning. For certain, I’ve already seen benefits to my heart health and overall fitness capability!

Monday in the HTMLab

Making Ads Less…”Ad”-y

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adslessady
I’ve toyed with the idea of putting lots of ads or sponsored posts on my sites for years, but I’ve rarely if ever gone through with it. On the one hand, I’d love to make a little money off these labors of love, but on the other hand, I’d rather not clutter up my sites with ugly or annoying ads that will drive away the visitors I do get.

This is a common concern for many webdesigners: how do we make ads/sponsored posts less…well, “ad”-y? How do you incorporate them seamlessly into your design, so that people notice them but don’t get distracted by them? How do you make them fit with your site, rather than having to fit your site around them?

As I have puzzled over this for my own personal benefit, a few salient points came to mind (ones which I may or may not put into action over the next few months). If you’re considering using ads or sponsored posts as part of your website, here are some things to think about:

Choose ads that are relevant to your site.

Nothing is more distracting than going to a favorite website and seeing a huge animated ad for random pills or e-books blaring at you from the sidebar or top of the page. When possible, choose ads that go with your site content, because it will be more interesting to your users. For instance, an ad about the latest video game controller wouldn’t suit a medical site, but it would work beautifully on a gaming site!

Try to tame visual ads’ “gaudiness factor.”

Lots of flashing colors, bad font choices, and low-quality pictures tend to plague visual ads, and to some degree a designer/developer can’t change those design choices (much as we would like to!). But you can still place flashy ads on an attractively-designed sidebar, so they’re visible and eye-catching, but they don’t actually interfere with regular content.

(Important: Avoid ads that block content, either as a pop-up window or one of those God-awful slide-in ads that gray out the rest of the screen. I can’t stand those things, and I’m sure I’m not the only user who does. Ads that don’t make the user look at them are best.)

Endorse products you’ve personally tried.

This is a pet peeve of mine: Don’t just randomly endorse a product in a blog post because the people behind the product are going to pay you mega bucks. If I’m a regular user of your website and see that kind of post, I want to know why you like that product, not just “Hey, buy this product, it’s cool–here’s a link, bye.”

It may be harder to choose to write about a product that may not pay you as much, but the company will likely be happier with your ad for them, especially if your passion for the product encourages more business.

Add anecdotes from your testing of the product you’re advertising.

Going off the last point: tell a story about your use of whatever product you’re writing about. If I’m a regular visitor, I probably already appreciate your honest opinion on things, and I enjoy your writing style–why not show off your ability to share your opinion by telling about your first experience (or seventieth experience) of the product? I’m sure I could write some pretty and informative prose about my favorite shampoos and favorite jeans than I could ever write about a mascara brand I’ve never tried, for instance.

Summary

Make ads and sponsored posts a true extension of your site, and make them meaningful and useful to your users. Junky, purely annoying ad content should be a definite thing of the past!

Monday in the HTMLab

Liquid Layouts vs. Ice Layouts

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liquidvsice

Even though most of the Web today has gone to using liquid layouts (also known as “responsive design”), the fixed width “ice” layout style is still quite popular. Today, I’ll demonstrate both layout styles, as well as give advice on which style is best for your website.

Liquid Layout/Responsive Design

Click for Liquid Layout Interactive Example in New Window

Pro: Expands and contracts to fit browser width

Whatever size your user’s screen is, whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or laptop/desktop, the liquid layout style will stretch or compress to fit it. You don’t end up with acres of space to either side of the layout, and you don’t end up having to scroll side to side to see all the content on a tiny screen.

Con: Distributes content unevenly and haphazardly

If your reader has a really wide screen, they’ll be jerking your head back and forth to read the long, extended one line of content going clear across the layout. You also might have large blocks of white space between layout elements, giving the design a chaotic look.

Ice Layout

Click for Ice Layout Interactive Example in New Window

Pro: Allows for perfectly-spaced designs

No need to worry about whether your content will be interrupted by huge blocks of uncontrollable white space! Ice layouts give you the ability to perfectly control where things will be placed, whether it’s images, lists, forms, content boxes, or anything else.

Con: Requires side-scrolling or zooming for smaller screens

If your user is viewing your site with a tablet, for instance, and you’ve created a beautiful desktop design, an ice layout will require a lot of zooming in and out to read the content. It’s annoying and time-consuming, and most users simply won’t bother.

Which Kind Should I Use?

Use Liquid Layout If Your Site Is…

  • Based on visual media
  • Meant for mobile users primarily
  • Not dependent on big layout graphics

Use Ice Layout If Your Site Is…

  • Based on text
  • Meant for laptop/desktop users primarily
  • Dependent on big layout graphics

Summary

Though liquid layouts seem to have won the day for now, you can most certainly still use ice layouts in this age of responsive design. You just have to know when to use fixed-width and when to use a variable-width style!

Monday in the HTMLab

The (Necessary?) Evil: the Pop-Up

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thenecessaryevilpopup
Most of us think of pop-ups the same way we think of bugs–annoying or dangerous little pests, the vehicles for drive-by downloads of spyware or viruses, or the tools of the most callous ad-using web designers. Pop-ups, above all, block a user’s experience of an individual website, and thus they can be unnecessary and irritating interruptions.

But pop-ups, as bad a reputation as they have, CAN be used for good purposes. While the fad of using pop-ups as a layout option may be passe, there is still a legitimate call for the miniaturized window in web design, as we’ll talk about below.

Bad Pop-Ups

The usual breed of pop-ups are used in web design for ads, inconvenient surveys, or even unscrupulous downloads (whether you’re aware of them or not). These pop-ups:

  • Look like cheap ads (various bright colors, huge, primary-colored text, animated GIFs, etc)
  • Appear at inconvenient browsing times
  • Appear without warning when a link is clicked

Good Pop-Ups

What I term “good pop-ups” can contain content that doesn’t necessitate a full webpage, such as a feedback or contact form, a listing of affiliates or joined sites, comment or guestbook forms, etc. Good pop-ups:

  • Contain small amounts of easy-to-scan text or photo content
  • Match your site’s layout style and color scheme, if possible
  • Appear after sufficient warning (i.e., “link opens in new window” or “pop-up will appear”)

Other Important Notes about Pop-Ups

Firstly, you don’t want to overuse pop-ups in your layout. A good rule of thumb, I’ve found, is to use no more than two instances of pop-ups in an entire site, maybe using one as an announcement platform and one as a form for contacting or subscribing.

Secondly, pop-ups should not cover the whole screen. Since you can direct the size and positioning of pop-ups, make sure you are placing an appropriately-sized pop-up where it will not be obtrusive to the rest of your design and content. You want your user to see it, of course, but there’s nothing a user hates worse than having to deal with an unexpected stumbling block in reading a site’s content.

Thirdly, do not make your design hinge on your pop-up. Since many users now have pop-up blockers and ad blockers in their browsers, make your content available both as a pop-up and as a regular page, so nobody misses out on your content.

Summary

Pop-ups have long been vilified on the Internet, but by using them smartly and carefully (and not depending on them too heavily), you can include them without annoying your users. Happy readers are returning readers!

Monday in the HTMLab

Designing for Mobile Devices

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designingformobiledevices
Are you stuck on how to create a good-looking and functional mobile device layout for your site? Then you’re not alone–when you’re trying to design for a much smaller screen than you ever thought possible, it can feel as though you’re trying to cram your entire website into 480 pixels of space!

However, we independent designers can take cues from social media sites; Facebook, Twitter, and other sites manage to maintain their site’s “look,” while still making their design appropriate for a mobile device. How do they do that? Read on to find out!

Think small for site logo and content

Instead of doing a huge background image or a great big header image with your site name, a simple icon and text declaring your site name should be enough for a mobile design. Better yet, use CSS to style a text version of your logo so that mobile users don’t have to wait to load a weirdly-sized image.

Also, when designing how your content should display, imagine a space about 300-400 pixels wide, and about the same in height. Your content must fit comfortably within that space, in big enough font that mobile users can read on their small screens.

Choose text and background colors that contrast well

When someone is using a mobile device to view your website, you don’t want them having to squint and turn their phone every which way trying to read your content. Make it easy on your users’ eyes! Using a white background and black text is a classic choice, but feel free to choose any one very light color and one very dark color to use.

Use icons rather than text

Whenever possible, change out text links for icons. Not only is it space-saving on your smaller mobile-friendly designs, but it is also less tiny text to read, which will lower your users’ frustration level drastically. (Also, make the icons big enough to tap!)

Make your page easy to tab through using down arrow key

For those who have touch-screen smartphones, they will be able to scroll down with a swipe of their fingertip down the screen. However, you also want to make sure that your non-touch-screen mobile users can use the down arrow on their phones to “scroll” efficiently. Don’t crowd too many links or pics on one mobile-friendly page–that’s just more for the down arrow key to highlight. (This brought to you by a former non-touch-screen user)

Summary

With these tips, you can make a compact, easy-to-read, functional mobile design for any site. It might look a bit bare-bones on your big screen, but trust me, your small-screen users will thank you!

Monday in the HTMLab

Should My Designs Be Deep and Wide?

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shouldmydesignsbedeep
I’ve been designing websites now since 2003, and I’ve seen quite a few web design fads go by. At one time, left-aligned, horizontally “skinny” designs (barely 500 px wide) were the trend; then, it was horizontally- and vertically-centered larger background graphics, with an iframe floated atop them.

Now, as more and more computers are coming equipped with wider screens, I’ve seen more designers widening their designs to 1000 pixels or more–something I would have never seen coming back in the 500-px days. Some layouts are so wide that you have to scroll sideways if you’re on an older monitor.

Since I like to design sites that are accessible to as many monitor sizes as possible, I’ve found myself wondering if I should follow suit with the current “wide design” trend. Since widescreen monitors have become so popular, should designers now build wider layouts for their websites?

Wider Layout: Pros

More space to fit content “above the fold”
You can fit much more content on a wider layout, since you have space not only for text-based content, but for multiple sidebars full of widgets, photo thumbnails, video previews, playlists, etc.

Content is more spaced-out and readable
Since wider layouts use more of the screen space, your content can expand a little; more white space makes it much easier for users to read and enjoy your content, since it isn’t all crammed together.

With more space, you can use larger layout images
Wider layouts can mean bigger graphics–you can create huge background images and float your content on top of them, or experiment with many different images joined together to create a collage effect.

Wider Layout: Cons

People with smaller monitors have to scroll sideways
In the hunt for more and more horizontal space for web content, people with older monitors are going to be left out. Narrower screens will force such users to scroll sideways to see all your content (VERY annoying), and not everyone is going to upgrade to a new monitor just to view your site.

Page can take longer to load
With all this awesome media-rich content, users could be stuck waiting for your page to load a little bit longer, especially on slower connections (like mobile users–more on that below).

  • Not mobile device-friendly
    Widescreen layouts are definitely NOT mobile-friendly–and much before now, you would have needed to make a separate mobile layout so that you didn’t leave your on-the-go users behind. BUT…there is another solution.

    Responsive Design: Those With Wide Screens See a Widescreen Layout!

    A design that shrinks and expands with differing screen resolutions (also called “responsive design”) is the new way to support all your users’ screen size needs. But it actually has its roots in a design practice I learned back when I first started in webdesign.

    In the early to mid-2000s, 800px x 600px was the standard screen resolution, though some people had upgraded to a larger 1024px x 768px resolution. Many of my fellow webdesigners fixed this problem with “alternate layouts”–they made one layout sized for 800 x 600 viewers, and another for their 1024 x 768 viewers. Then, on their splash pages (entrance pages which have gone the way of the dodo bird), they had simple links for you to click to go to each design.

    Today’s responsive design, with its automatic “resizing” to visitors’ screen resolution, is the best way to get a “widescreen” feel for users whose screen resolutions can make the most of it. Yet it also doesn’t lock out smaller screens–it’s an automatically customized user experience, one that was heralded by the “user choice” model of the mid-2000s.

    Summary

    Widescreen layouts don’t have to be just “widescreen” anymore–with responsive design, you can make a layout that satisfies most every visitor’s viewing needs. It’s a lot more backend work, but it’s definitely worth it!

    • Saturday with the Spark

    Journals in Verse: My Personal Poetry

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    journalsinverse
    I’ve been writing poetry since I was a very little girl. Some of my earliest verses were composed on a summer vacation when I was about 7 years old, studying the motion of the waves against the beach as doubtless so many other poets before me had done. I was inspired by the fluid rocking motion of the water, and how it left the beach looking swept and clean, so I jotted down a little poem about it.

    What I Used to Think Poetry was About

    Poetry indeed served as a welcome diversion from other subjects like math and science, but I didn’t do a whole lot of it during elementary school. From what I learned in school, you simply had to write poetry in a very specific way for it to be considered “art.” I toyed with the idea of becoming a poet when I was older, but I certainly didn’t have the patience to sit there and rhyme ending words, or to make each line be the same length with the same beats as its predecessors. It seemed like a lot of work–and it ended up sounding a lot less inspired and beautiful–when I tried it, at least.

    Poetry: Not Merely Meter and Rhyme

    But the hangups I had about “appropriate” poetry style all but evaporated in middle school. I began to need a way to talk about the despair and anger I was feeling, without writing too directly about it and getting angry all over again. So I just wrote, breaking my poetry’s lines wherever it felt “right” to break them, choosing words only for their biggest emotional impact.

    This poetry, in a real sense, became my journal entries. As I worked with fitting my emotions into a small space of verse, my feelings and problems became concentrated and yet refined. Other people could relate to what I had written, but it didn’t hurt me quite so bad to read it as it had hurt while I was writing it all out. It was quite like getting a splinter out of my finger and showing the sliver of wood to other people–it was painful poetry, but it was good because it was so raw.

    I wrote this type of self-discovering poetry all throughout high school and well into college, and even some into graduate school. Much of that poetry probably shouldn’t really be shown to anybody now, since my style has evolved as I have grown up (not to mention my mindset). But the art form served its purpose–each poem helped me stay in control of my emotions, storing them in a paper jar, like storing fruit by canning it. And, I can reopen the jars at any time and re-experience my life at that moment.

    Poetry as An Old Faithful Friend

    As my life has become brighter, especially with the advent of my current relationship and my continued work on my novel and my music, I find myself less likely to lean on poetry’s shoulder, writing mainly life-observing poems rather than inward-looking poems (though I can still wring the tears out of a piece of paper if I’m in a mood to do so!). I use poetry now as an occasional journal entry, a way to immortalize a moment rather than a way to work out a problem. But I know that I can always write out my problem in verse; just like a faithful old journal, the art form of the poem waits for me to write.

    How to Start Writing Poetry for Yourself

    Though I’m sure the poetry purists out there are probably recoiling in horror from this post, I still recommend approaching poetry as an art form you can USE rather than as an art form you have to produce “just so.” If you let others’ guidelines for writing poetry become rigid rules, you can actually stifle your own creativity before it ever has a real chance.

    That’s why I’m not suggesting any specific rules or regulations. Rhyme if you want to, make it rhythmical if you want to, but feel free to explore the edges of the art form, too; discover the line where speech becomes poetry, where words become art. Write what you really feel and think, and worry about refining it later, if it even needs refining. The world may not need another perfectly measured and rhymed work of art–but it does need your thoughts.