A Lesson Learned Via Server Logs & Twitter

Last night I was going through my server logs for Pixel Currents, curious to see who was visiting the site and how they found it. I noticed a few people had clicked through from a couple twitter accounts belonging to people I don’t know, so of course I headed over to Twitter to see what they had said (I’m keeping their usernames private.)

The first said

Seen this good-looking Thesis mod? http://pixelcurrents.com/ And they do WP / Thesis design work #thesiswp #thesisdesigners

Wow! Thanks!
Then a response came in:

Not to be rude, but I hope their design work is not as sloppy as their logo – it takes 5 minutes to fix bad letter conections

followed by

Look at the connections between the letters, you will see the glitches – you normally fix this issues when you design a logo

Um. Ouch.

The second tweeter was talking about this. You can see I’ve pointed out where the cursive letters don’t line up exactly. I’ve been using this font for years and it’s never been a problem because my logo was always small enough that the lack of clean letter connections wasn’t an issue. But with my current design I’ve gone BIG and BOLD and he’s right, I should have taken the time to make it cleaner.

In fact I had noticed the problem, but it never occurred to me that anyone else would care, and I just didn’t take the time to fix it. But that one tweet made me acutely aware that my site needs to be an expression of my best work, not a lazy afterthought.

I could have been insulted (and I admit my gut reaction was “who does he think he is?”) but after a moment I realized that he was right, and I had learned something important about design. So I responded:

thanks for pointing out the flaws in my logo. I admit I got a little lazy on my own site, I’ll fix when I have time .

and received this back

@banannie you’re welcome – I know like it is – I’m currently redoing my site from scratch – overdue since 2 years

Instead of getting flustered and defensive (which has been my typical reaction in the past) I chose to see this as an opportunity, and connected with someone new who appears to be quite interesting!

I will fix that logo, too, as soon as I have some free time .