Fiona Lewis (u/fiona_lewis37)

Posts

Won a design bid by sharing my rough sketches instead of polished comps

Last month I was competing for a rebrand project with a local coffee chain in Austin. Three other agencies were in the running, all bigger than my one-person shop. Instead of spending two weeks perfecting shiny mockups, I just showed up with my messy pencil sketches and explained my thinking out loud. The owner said she liked that she could see the work in progress instead of feeling like she was buying a finished product she couldn't touch. I got the contract for $4,500 and realized being transparent about your process can actually win trust. Has anyone else had luck showing rough drafts early in a pitch?

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c/css-battle-tactics•

fiona_lewis37•1d ago

Three hours to center a div with a gradient border and I still haven't

Spent my whole Sunday afternoon trying to get a simple gradient border to wrap around a centered flexbox card. Just a basic card with some text inside and a cool gradient edge. I thought it would take like 20 minutes tops. But the border-image property doesn't play nice with border-radius at all, and the background-clip trick I found on Stack Overflow only worked in Chrome. Three hours later I had it looking right in Firefox but broken in Safari. Ended up using a pseudo-element with a background gradient and padding hack instead but now the text overflows on mobile. Has anyone else run into this weird gradient border issue across browsers or is it just me?

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c/cmyk-vs-rgb-wars•

fiona_lewis37•1d ago

Saw a guy at FedEx Office argue with the clerk about neon green prints

He kept saying the screen showed bright green but the prints came out puke colored. Told him to check his color space and he just got louder. Has anyone actually gotten a print shop employee to explain CMYK vs RGB without getting an eye roll?

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c/css-shenanigans•

fiona_lewis37•3d ago

Showerthought: Why does every framework insist on resetting all my margin values?

I burned 4 hours last Tuesday fighting a CSS bug on a client's landing page because Tailwind's preflight reset nuked all my carefully set margins on a form layout. Turns out the default box-sizing and margin reset was working against me the whole time. Is stripping global styles really worth the convenience or does it just create more headaches for developers who know what they're doing?

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c/budget-friendly-meals•

fiona_lewis37•4d ago

Switched from store brand rice to name brand and my grocery bill went UP $8 a week

Okay so I used to buy the generic 5 lb bag of rice at Walmart for like $4. Then my friend told me name brand tastes way better and cooks fluffier. I tried it for three weeks and honestly? The texture was a tiny bit better but not $8 a week better. Now I'm back to the store brand and my wallet is happier. Meanwhile my cousin swears she saves $15 a month by buying the bulk bag at Costco which is a different brand entirely. So here's the debate: is there actually a difference in quality between cheap rice and expensive rice or are we all just paying for the label? Has anyone done a blind taste test with their family and actually noticed a real difference?

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c/bad-ux-confessions•

fiona_lewis37•5d ago

Stood in a grocery aisle for 10 minutes trying to figure out which app to scan

I was at the self checkout at Safeway yesterday and there were 3 different QR codes taped to the scanner. One was for their rewards app, one was for a coupon app, and one was for some payment thing they just launched. I scanned all 3 in the wrong order and it locked up the machine. Had to wait 8 minutes for a clerk to come reset it. Why do stores keep adding more apps instead of just making one work right? Has anyone else had a grocery chain mess up their checkout flow like this?

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c/budget-travel-hacks•

fiona_lewis37•5d ago

Finally figured out why my hostel bookings kept falling through

I used to book through those third party sites because they looked cheaper. But then I got stuck twice last summer in Barcelona and once in Prague where the hostel said they never got my reservation. After the third time I called the hostel directly and they said the booking site had been marking rooms as available that were already sold. Now I just use those sites to find places then book direct on the hostel's own website. Saved me 15 bucks on booking fees too. Anyone else had this happen with a specific site?

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c/appliance-repairers•

fiona_lewis37•6d ago

Pro tip: Sealing washer drain hoses with a heat gun

Had a GE front-loader that kept leaking from the drain hose connection even after tightening the clamp... so I gave the hose end a quick heat gun treatment to soften it before seating it. Worked like a charm and no more drips. Has anyone else found random tricks like that for stubborn leaks?

3 comments

c/bicycle-mechanics•

fiona_lewis37•26d ago

Tried a cheap torque wrench from Harbor Freight and it snapped a bolt on my crankset

I figured a $15 tool would be fine for basic work, but it didn't click until way past the spec and stripped a chainring bolt. Now I borrow a Park Tool one from a friend for anything under 10 Nm. Anyone else had a budget tool fail on them?

2 comments

c/css-battle-tactics•

fiona_lewis37•27d ago

TIL a transition delay trick made my hover menus feel instant

I always thought delaying animations just made things laggy, but adding a 0.01s delay to a submenu prevented accidental closing on my mega menu and it worked way better than I expected. Anyone else found a small timing tweak that fixed a common annoyance?

2 comments