Gvim and Graphical Design

Start working on building your local development environment. Install your tools, get them properly configured and learn how to use them, to produce a lot of beautiful, valuable art. Develop your routine. Cultivate productive habits, in yourself and all of your teammates.

Your Business Plan

Write down your goals and plans. How are you going to make your productivity profitable. You can get a good job. That is one good way to earn a living. You can build a series of websites and sell your art and computer science there. You can sell other people’s product and services. Write this stuff down, every once in a while. Writing your plan solidifies it in your own consciousness.

Gvim

To set up your local development environment, you are going to have to get familiar with your tools, yourself and your audience.

For example, I am going to start using Gvim for writing on this Windows 10 desktop, to practice using vim. I’ve already got a fairly decent color scheme set up. I found the _vimrc file in File Explorer > This PC > Windows (C) > Program Files (x86) > Vim and copied and pasted my .vimrc file onto the end of it and then installed all my Plugins in Vim.

They seem to be working. The relative line numbers are working and the title line at the bottom of the page seems to be working. Nerdtree is working, but the keyboard shortcuts I have set to open and close Nerdtree are not. I can get to it fairly easy, by typing :N Tab Enter. Use :q to close Nerdtree. I’ll work on the shortcuts later.

For now, I’m using Gvim. Everything, except the color scheme, seems to be working in Vim. I want to get familiar with Gvim and see if that toolbar is useful in my workflow. One issue I’ve already noticed, I’m not sure if its a problem or a good thing, is that I can use the mouse and the arrow keys in Gvim. It makes it a lot easier to use Vim, but it will also make it that much more difficult to learn to use the keyboard, instead of the mouse and arrow keys.

I used PowerToys to switch the esc and caps lock keys on this Windows machine. The alias that I have set in the _vimrc to set ; to be : is working.

Measurement

Another interesting project I’ve been working on today is getting familiar with the conversions between inches, millimeters and Pixels. There are 25.4 mm per inch. I have a 27 inch monitor that is 23.5 inches wide and 13.5 inches tall. That is 685.8 mm diagonally, 596.9 mm wide and 342.9 mm tall. It has a display resolution of 2560 x 1440, which all adds up to 109 Pixels Per Inch (PPI).

I’m getting all this figured out now, so that when I am creating drawings using Inkscape and Krita, and adjusting the CSS on my websites, I will be familiar with the dimensions of my computer. I also read somewhere, a while back, that the graphic art design community is at least thinking about switching design measurements from pixels to millimeters. I definitely think we should switch from inches to millimeters, as quickly as possible.

Being able to think about the dimensions of the projects you are working on is obviously, very important for designing your websites and other projects. Knowing how wide your columns and containers are is valuable information. Understanding how to communicate that information to your computer, to tell it how wide you want your container to be for example, is important. You need to know how to do that to be an effective CSS artist.

Local Development

Let’s say you have Windows 10 and Adobe Creative Cloud installed. You also have a lot of the free and open source tools, like Gvim, Inkscape, Gimp and Krita installed. You can write your books in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer and you can publish them with Scribus or Adobe InDesign. Make sure you install Ghostscript before you install Scribus, so Scribus can autodetect it during installation. If you forget to do that, then just open a Scribus document as a Ghostscrip document and Scribus will find it.

Get your website account set up at local development environment on your computer and then update your live website using Filezilla.

Now you have your smart phone camera and your DSLR camera to take lots of pictures and videos. Keep them in your file system and get them well organized. Use Gimp and DarkTable and Lightroom and Photoshop to edit and organize your photos. Design a photography studio for your website. Use Inscape, Krita, Gimp and your Adobe Creative Cloud tools to produce lots of beautiful, valuable art.

Each one of these tools is a complicated peice of artificial intelligence. Pick and choose the ones you want to develop your expertise in. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Get really good at using a few of them, and then, like a mechanic with a big tool box and bench to work on, you’ll be in business.

Monetize your content.

Create a Clickbank or CJ Affiliates account and put some advertising banners on your websites. Set up your accounts on BitChute, YouTube and other social media accounts and start commenting on those websites. Work on attracting an audience to your website. Once you attract people to your website, you need to have some interesting content to keep them there. Then, you lead them to your Most Wanted Response, such as, to buy your books.

Conclusion

So, this is a big project. It is going to take work. You are going to have to do a lot of research. Learn how to use your tools and work fast, work smart and work safely. Be a prolific artist and high performance sales executive.