Free Popcorn Vector

Well, I was looking for some free popcorn vectors today for a project. I didn't find any, and so had to draw a few of my own. In doing so, I quickly realized that popcorn is a very tricky thing to draw... and is in fact sort of ugly. I also became very hungry for popcorn.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this will be helpful to anyone whatsoever, but I decided to make my little popcorn sketches free and available to download under a very broad creative commons license. If you use these in your own project, I'd love to see the results!


Download the free .PDF file (262 KB)
Download the free .AI file (1.04 MB)

UI Design

UI Design is more difficult than it looks! It's really a lot of fun though. And it would be rewarding to know that my design is being put to actual use by people -- similar to the satisfaction of a well-trafficked website. This is a sample UI design for a project I can't quite mention at the moment. Just don't ask how long this took. ^_^;


Also! My charity site client is using Intuit for web hosting. Well, I figured I could use this past Sunday to install his site on his domain... but no dice. They won't allow you to upload PHP files! (Or ASP, or CGI, or a whole host of other file types...) I've never heard of this before... and couldn't believe it. And he is paying a premium for this service. Has anyone used Intuit before?

Sorry for the dearth of updates

Well, life has been very busy lately, which I don't mind. But that means that I haven't posted any of the new things I've been working on.

Some t-shirt designs:

Prom shirts for the Linda Nolen Learning Center. We did these on the really nice, soft Comfort Colors shirts.


Seagrove "Beach Goddess" concept designs.


Custom website for an unnamed special occasion recently.

I've also been Diving into HTML 5 - I really enjoy the informal style with which this O'Reilly reference is written. I LOVE seeing all the new specifications. ♥

American Workers' Relief Fund Website

Well, I have the skeleton finished on this, making it my 2nd Joomla site. I did not make this template from scratch (unlike my first site), but rather modified an existing template to fit my needs.


View the work in progress: http://www.katmcgo.com/awrf

This site is in its VERY initial stages right now, with no content to speak of, but I really like that using Joomla, I can create a site like this in less than a day's time.

Business Card for Alabama Nights

Quick post - new business card design for Alabama Nights. I did this in Photoshop -- no stock art used. Was very fun indeed to create. :D

American Workers' Relief Fund Logo

I am just now getting started on a new project for a charity that assists those who are out-of-work and about to lose their homes. It will be a complete branding: logo, website, and anything else they need. Below is the starting point for all of this -- hopefully AWRF will like one of them. :)

First Joomla Site - Urasenke Birmingham

Working on my first Joomla template site for the Urasenke Tea Ceremony group here in Birmingham.

Their current site: http://urasenkebirmingham.org/
My (under construction) Joomla site: http://urasenke.katmcgo.com/

I still have a lot of variables to style and things to do, but the basics are all up at least. And I learned something interesting about cPanel (WISH I HAD KNOWN THIS AGES AGO): It seems it will not just extract any archived file you throw its way; it has to be a tar.gz file. The compression can be preformed in Terminal (on OS X).


I'm finding that I care a bit less about how IE 6 views my pages these days. If I close my eyes and pretend it's not there, will people stop using it? Unfortunately, the answer is NO, but as long as elements break down gracefully, and the page is fully functional (and not terribly ugly), I'm cool with some small variations. That being said, I still need to put this site through its paces with some IE rules, unfortunately. And some lame IE 6 gifs to replace the pngs. Even something this simple...

Update! The IE tweaks went very smoothly, and not much needed to be done. Just some simple fixes (swapping out "outline" for the deprecated "border" tag; swapping out 2 PNGs for GIFs, etc.). Instead of using separate stylesheets for this meager code, as I have done in the past, I am now using the conditional "body" method:

• <!--[if lt IE 7 ]> <body class="ie6"> <![endif]-->


• <!--[if IE 7 ]> <body class="ie7"> <![endif]-->


• <!--[if IE 8 ]> <body class="ie8"> <![endif]-->


• <!--[if IE 9 ]> <body class="ie9"> <![endif]-->


• <!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--> body <!--<![endif]-->

You can read more about this method here: http://davidbcalhoun.com/tag/ie-hack