Design by accident.

Design by accident.

The alignment of the logo in the header was an accident. Didn't really mean to put it there, but I forgot to adjust the size of the top black bar. My name was supposed to go inside the black bar. But I uploaded the change and saw the the accident. I was about to fix when I decided it looked better.

I have to admit that I don't know as much as I should about css. The tricks. The workarounds. And especially dealing with the differences between Firefox and IE7. We don't even want to throw Safari and Opera in the mix. But I always check them just in case. And as long as they look presentable, although not the same, I go with it.

Unfortunately the logo disappeared in IE7, which meant trying to reproduce the accident with better css.

But I no longer look at accidents as such. Everything is a lesson and I know that if I don't see it that way now, I will later on. It allowed me to see something that I wouldn't have in this case. Or I could have spent the rest of last night trying to match the site design to the picture I had in my mind and ended up with something less than what I have now.

But this is not the only time I have had accidents like this. They happen all the time. Do I think there is some mysterious force behind it? Bullshit. It is just a frame of mind. I realize that my knowledge is not where I want it to be in certain subjects is not where I want it to be. Accidents may take me further. Also, I do all of this myself for now. No outsourcing of anything. The accident is part of my mastermind group.

An accident or mistake can be a stumbling block or a taste of a new direction to go. It's up to you how you treat it.


Stephan Miller

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Kansas City Software Engineer and Author

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