About the Girl
My name is Diona. The name is pronounced dee-Oh-nah. I was named after my grandmother on my mother's side but am a very Americanized Filipino girl who lives in the city of Chicago.
I'm a graphic designer but also a mediocre writer, illustrator, and photographer. I am currently 24 years old and a graduate of Columbia College Chicago. Prior to Columbia, I transferred from UIC in Fall 2006 switching my degree choice from a BN to a BFA in Graphic Design. My parents wanted me to have a career in medicine but I've gravitated towards web and graphic design since getting a computer in the late 90s.
As of late September 2010, I work as a full-time Junior Art Director at a Michigan Avenue ad agency. I also occasionally design for Indoor Panda Designs ... Which is mostly just me and the husband doing web development (site coming soon!). He codes, I design.
I concert hop when I can and enjoy music of all genres (especially rap and country). Lately, I've been a fan of the mashup and adore Girl Talk and The Hood Internet. I listen for the music value not the dancibility. I'm kind of introverted for the most part and would be pretty content sitting around watching a forgotten 90s movies, reading a book, or getting completely drawn in by video games. Knitting, crocheting, and chilling with the hubby & three cats isn't bad either. I'm kind of a homebody, if you did not notice.
While my major lied with the Art & Design department at Columbia where I was daily preached of the greatness of Apple Computers and Steve Jobs, I do not worship either.
I am found in Facebook someplace as well as MySpace, Flickr (WARNING: Slightly infested with SecondLife pictures. It is a bit shameful, yes.), Last.fm, Reddit, GoodReads and then kind of near nonexistent at LiveJournal, DeviantArt and Ravelry.
About the Site
This domain was opened mid-april 2006. Before then, around 2004, it used to be a collective of my art, web designs, and poetry called mourning with a separate blog at tourniquet. The entries from that blog are still on the site and can be found at this link. It's now just fancytoy the blog. While it primarily acts as a personal site, I may post random visual stimuli I may find amusing. As of mid-April 2010 though, I started a daily doodle project which you can find via the top-most menu.
About the Layout
This is layout number eight best viewed in Firefox 3.x. I'm new to the @font-face CSS so ... Anything that doesn't support that will make the site look funny.
This layout was started on December 16, 2010 and finished on December 17, 2010 but didn't go live until February 15, 2011. Its color palette was based off of the work "A doe, A Deer" by Julie West shown below.
The fonts used on the layout itself are Grover and Mousse Script from Sudtipos. It was coded by hand by myself in Notepad++ but with minor JQuery taught and executed by Joe Kaiser.