A Liquid State

Hey guys! Welcome back for another blog post! Sorry I missed last Friday's post. I completely lost track of the days of the week! I did a little traveling at the beginning of last week, so my Monday and Tuesday were actually Thursday and Friday. Oops. But while I was traveling I had the opportunity to look into Shopify from a designers perspective.

Shopify, in case you haven't heard of it is an online store host. If you've got a product to sell, you can sell it with Shopify. For instance I could have a CGWise store where I sell shirts and posters... That's not a bad idea actually... Anyway, they provide the platform for stores to have an online presence. They also provide tools to run your business and customize your store website. And all of this is done through a browser in an online user interface. Many customizations and tools are available for sale through their site, and some of them are free. In fact, you could actually run your store completely having paid no more than the very small cost of the Shopify subscription.

Every store uses what's called a Theme. Some of these are basic (like the default free one), and some are more elaborate. For me, it's Themes that make the experience interesting. It's the graphical representation of your store online. Or more accurately, it is the representation of your users experience, and your own, when using your store. And Themes are completely customizable, from basic editing of existing elements to the more advanced editing of code. Every Theme's code is open for you to explore and customize. Or, you can even make your own.

I see this customization option with some irony though. I have always kept computer programming as a hobby, to the point where I actively made the choice not to do it professionally. I had a hard time finishing projects, as I tended to get over involved in the graphical side of things. Having made that observation, I'm steering myself toward a graphical job. Now, as I sit here actively pursuing graphic design I find myself diving back in to the programming world. You see, the customization of Shopify's Themes is done with a scripting language.

Scripting languages can seem daunting, in fact some are almost as daunting as programming languages. But in the case of Shopify's scripting language called Liquid, it seems to fit quite nicely along side HTML. HTML, if you don't know is pretty much the basis of most of the webpages in existence. It's something that I played around with back in the 90's, but HTML itself has gone through a lot of changes. Coding in Liquid is like taking simple pieces of programmers code and putting it inside HTML. And it provides some pretty awesome results.

For me, Liquid is a synergy of graphics, user interface, and programming. It seems very natural. I'm quite looking forward to getting in to it. Shopify makes that easy to do too. Just sign up for a free developers account and you'll find there is a ton of material free for you to view and educate yourself. If you don't actually want to work from within the Shopify environment, they've open sourced Liquid, which means that it's freely available for anyone to use however they see fit.

All in all it seems that I am embracing all of my skills on my journey in graphic design. I think that's the way it should be.

--Charlie Griffin

Stick with me, and we'll get wise together. 
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