In other news, I got Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 the other day, and it’s really quite a disappointment. I haven’t found any features that make it better than PsE 4.0. Rather, it just seems simplified (and stupified) so people who don’t know anything about image editing can make kitschy images. Feels really unprofessional, and definitely not worth what it costs.

Enjoy.

In any case, I’ve got one for you today. I kind of think I’ve written this same on at least three times before, but I think I did a good job of it this time, and it’s not going to mysteriously disappear as the others seem to have done.

CSS Types: Internal, External, and Inline CSS.

Venture forth into education and knowledge!

Anyhow, I have been tagged by Emma Lou, and I guess that means I have to disclose personal information and ask you to do the same…

The rules:
1. You must post these rules.
2. Each person must post 11 things about themselves in their journal.
3. Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post, and create eleven new questions for the people you tag to answer.
4. You have to choose 11 people to tag and link them on the post
5. Go to their page and tell them you have tagged him/her.
6. No tag backs.
7. No “you are tagged if you are reading this.” You legitimately (AKA, really, truly, with all honesty)have to tag 11 people.

Gosh I hate these things. xD

1. What is your favourite colour?
Probably blue. I do tend to say that I have a favorite color scheme, not a favorite color, and that would be the color palette below that I used in my first half-decent figmint layout.

2. What is your favourite perfume/aftershave?
The glorious aroma of my cats. They smell like sleep, which is better than any perfume.

3. Eastenders or Hollyoaks?
Really don’t know what those are.

4. If you could have any animal in the world as a pet, which would it be?
An amiable dragon. It would be white with black on the undersides of its wings.

5. Winter or Summer?
Summer, totally. Freedom. Warmth. Ice cream. Not that I don’t eat ice cream all winter long; I do.

6. Favourite clothes shop?
I’m not really into clothes shopping. So no preference…

7. If you could go any where in the world, where would it be?
New Zealand of course. c: Most beautiful place ever. And Lord of the Rings, of course…

8. You can only take 3 items on a desert Island, what would they be?
1. The Internet
2. My computer
3. Adhesive: I have attempted to build shelters on desert islands many times, and always come to the conclusion that it’s downright impossible to do it without any adhesive glue or tape. *shakes head*

9. Coca cola or Pepsi?
I really don’t drink either, but Pepsi has always seemed like a Coke wannabe to me.

10. How often do you blog?
Once every few weeks. I try to make my blogs somewhat meaningful though, not the usual rants about daily life…

11. When did you start website designing?
Mm…maybe…sixth or seventh grade? Around five years ago. Wow. o-o

So now we get the point in the blog where I do some tagging and interrogation of my own. Now, I’ve never fancied tagging, as I have made apparent, but I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity and ask deep questions. So brace yourself.

1. Do you think you are unique? Why or why not?
2. What is song/piece of literature/art that describes your state in life? A brief explanation would be nice if you feel up to it.
3. What is your business on this here internet, and how long have you been at it?
4. Who is or was the most influential person of our time, and why?
5. Do you believe longterm peace is achievable in the world? Explain.
6. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
7. Would you rather be rich and unsatisfied, or destitute, alone, and satisfied?
8. What was the happiest moment of your life so far?
9. What is your goal in life?
10. Why is that goal meaningful to you?
11. If you think the world will ever end, roughly how long do we have left?

That was really…random. ,_, Oh well.

Have fun, Amy, Aashni, Alyssa, Jenny, Jena, Anna (What is with this strange trend in the first letter of all these names!?) Puffs, Katrien…and…dang…I’m fresh out of peoples names. x-x

Dang. x-x I was actually going to tag a legitimate number of people this time. Forgive me, Tag Overlord. And forgive me, those who I tagged. If any of you lurkers don’t have sites, feel free to tag yourself and post your responses in the comments. Yeah, I kind of just broke the rules. Noncomformity. Whoo…*waves flag unexuberantly*

Well, you may be looking at it night now, but if not, click options on the right and select the skin “Teal”! It’s what you’ve all been waiting for, hopefully. I very much enjoy it, and I hope you do too.

So, I succeeded there.

However, I am now toying with the idea of a new layout, and I’ve come to a familiar predicament. The navigation. I want a glorious, completely original navigation.
It is so easy to follow the trends and do the exact same thing as everyone else. Do you know how many sites have a navigation that reads “Home” “Domain” “Visitor” “More”? A lot. xD Please don’t be offended if you’re one of them; it’s only a bad thing when your goal in life is to be completely original.

It’s not simply the words of the navigation that are the hard part. It’s the placement. All in one line, about three hundred pixels from the tom underneath a banner? That is way overdone. This stuff takes a lot of thought and a few brainblasts, for me at least.
So, perhaps Figmint’ll have a new layout. It’s a matter of whether I can come up with something more original than what I’ve got now.

On a side note, I’ve been taking a photography class in school. It’s really intense, and takes a lot of time to get the right number of pictures, quality pictures, for the different assignments. That’s been keeping me busy, but I’ve taken some snazzy photos because of it, so that’s good. (: Here’s one that I really like, to make up for the lack of eye candy this month.

EDIT. 09/10/11.
Heheh. Just had to type 9, 10, 11 sometime today.
Anyway, due to popular demand by you commenters, I have changed the layout, and it looks a lot better, so thanks for the input! The text area now has a partially transparent black background, and the page scrolls, not the textarea. It’s a great improvement. ^^

Click the screenshot to go to the guild layouts page and get the code. It’s under Neo-related, obviously.

The first tutorial covers what CSS is, how it differs from HTML, the structure of a webpage, where CSS fits in it, and what selectors, properties, and values are. The second describes what divs, classes, and ids are, as well as the positioning and overflow properties.

Apologies for the long disappearance! I hope you guys find these tutorials handy.

Just an update—all the layouts on the guild layouts page up through the feline section definitely now work. I’ll continue fixing the rest soon.

Edit: I just got the courage to check my hit counter and saw that people are still visiting my site despite my *cough* neglect. I guess that’s also evidenced by the feedback I’m getting…Anyhow, thanks for visiting, visitors! It’s nice to not have to struggle and fight for every hit. Love you guys.

• fixing broken guild layouts
• making wordpress layouts
• working on the PhotoSort php project

I’ll also try to catch up with my affies. (Thanks for putting up with my inactivity. Dx)

I’ll keep you updated. (:

There are also two new siggies here (Somewhere Only We Know and Twisted Logic), and I’ll be working on more.

Enjoy.

So…this was a pretty epic project. I don’t know if it’s the best thing I’ve ever made, but it’s definitely one of the most—no, the most intense project I’ve done. And right now I’m going to tell you everything that went into it, ’cause it’s pretty interesting (at least I think so) and it’s design related. And this is supposed to be a design blog. Haha. Better than hearing about my rather unexciting day.

First step in the layout was the concept. It started with an idea, which I then drew on a whiteboard, and then, since white boards are not all too permanent, I sketched it out on paper. The plan is below. Click for larger view.

[Press esc to exit fullsize mode!]
Basically it’s themed after the song Viva la Vida. A lot of inspiration comes from the album cover, actually. It features the painting Liberty Leading the Troops. Besides being about kings and whatnot, I also played with the war theme. The fabric at the top and stains and whatnot…bangages and grime. The whole thing’s grungey, as you can see.

Then, obviously, the making! First I had to scope out what materials I had available, so I raided the fabric supply and scrounged around for some paper. ‘Course, who keeps half-rotten pieces of fabric and paper laying around the house? I might someday…Heheh, for design purposes, of course. But my parents don’t keep ‘em so I had to do some improvising.
I did manage to find some scraps of muslin (fabric), and some course fabric (burlap sack and bird seed bag). In the basement are lots of boxes of stuff from moving, and there happens to be a lot of stuff wrapped in nice crinkled paper, so I nabbed that as well.

I’ve tried a lot of ways to stain paper in the past and they usually don’t work at all. Invisible ink is way too hard, but I did use it for the distressed paper texture set. Trying some new things, I poured leftover coffee into a glass and stuffed a bunch of paper in their with it. After it’d sat for half a day, maybe longer, I set it out on a cookie sheet and sprinkled some Nestea Ice Tea mix on parts. That dissolved to leave dark splotches, and after drying for a while gorgeous paper.
Here are some pictures of my materials. In the first picture you can compare the unstained paper and the stained.

Who knows what a Clock Bus is? I do. And I’m not telling. You must live your life in a sad state of suspense.

To create the base of everything, the background of the actual layout part, I dug into my under-the-bed-random-piece-of-cardboard stash and used the back of a spiral bound notebook. Then I wrapped it with stained paper, which was still damp, and dried it with a heat gun. It was so hot there’s, um, kinda burn marks on the layout, haha. Hur. That was cool.
To make the fabric wrapped around the top I pretty much tied some muslin tightly around it and that was that. Cut off the excess and taped it together as well.

Ah. And then the hard part.
The ribbon-banner at the top gave me a brain-cramp because I was having trouble twisting it right. I had to debate from the sketch a bit here.
After making a nicely stained piece of paper, I made a silkscreen with all the different typographical components of the physical layout. Here’s a picture of it today. All dirty. Heh.

There are a few different parts here—two different “Long Live the Kings” the lyrics of Viva la Vida, and a FaT flag, for those of you who are in on that. The fonts used are Fountain Pen Frenzy and Ginga. Great fonts!
Before silkscreening, I messed around with fonts in photoshop for a while, trying to figure out whether red on black or black on red looked best for the text on the banner-thing. I also did some trial and error.

The most annoying part of this was blocking off parts of the screen I didn’t want to use. If I only wanted to print a “Long live the king” I had to cover the lyrics and whatnot with something. I also had to run upstairs and wash it between colors. Big pain.

The double printing of the word king…of course it wasn’t a mistake. It was just nearly impossible to line up the paper with the place the holes in the screen were. It all worked out in the end though, and after that dried, I screened on the lyrics and flag, taped the banner over the top, and things were really coming together.
At this time I messed around with the card placement. I settled for an evenly placed look with the suicide king on top and farther forwards than the others, since Viva la Vida is sort of about ruining yourself.

With all that done, I just had to worry about a background image and coding. There was so much trial and error here…tis crazy. I could probably go on indefinitely on this topic, but I won’t, because this article-blog is super-long (and hopefully equally pleasing to the voice in your head) already.

I wasn’t sure whether scanning and the photoshopping the image onto a wooden background, or just taking a picture of the layout on whatever surface would be best. I tried both, and photoshopping…can be an uber pain sometimes. This job way waaaaay to tedious, so I taped the layout onto a wooden doorframe, and took a picture. Taking a picture in a doorway is hard ’cause you can only go back two feet. I would not recommend the experience.

The layout has a repeating wooden background image, which is the same piece of wood as before. I strongly photoshopped the wood (mostly sharpening and adjusting colors and levels). The wood is almost red in the picture, and in reality, it’s not nearly as cool.

Ha.

*stares at length of blog* (Is it mostly pictures?)

Assembled in photoshop, I had the small task of coding left to do. I won’t go into the nitty gritty for the sake of those who don’t speak CSS, but eh, there isn’t all that much to say. OH MAN GUYS, the monospace fonts were just all over the place, but then I changed the line-height and was like, this ain’t working, it’s time for some georgia! Hahur.

The headers were another hurdle—trying to get the color of that paper to match the background paper. There was a ton of levels, sharpness, and color adjustment in there. After probably five attempts for each header I got it right. I think. Um. Don’t look too close! xD
The repeating background image and a background image hover-effect on the neopets were also painfully laden with trial and error. I now have folders full of different versions of the backgrounds…Bah.

But.
It’s done.
And it’s worth it. It’s quite something to make a layout out of your old notebook and clock bus papers and your/parent’s coffee. FUNSTUFF.

Congratulations, you read this long thing. You’re a master. I hope you’ve not only gained that title and learned that there exists a clock bus, but also learned what layout making can be like. I’d recommend, all you designers out there, seeing how much you can do from scratch. You might be surprised.

The end. 8D

So! What exactly have I done?

I’ve been working on painting a drawing I made a while back, of the final scene of my book. Its pretty gory. P: But, ah, I also made a spifflicious typography piece with the watercolours, based on Square One by Coldplay. Feast your eyes!

I really like doing typography by hand so I’ll be trying some more of that. Speaking of hands, I’ve decided to write with my right hand when I’m bored so as to become maybe-possibly ambidextrous.

Now, what else? I’ve done more than watercolours! I’m working on a userlookup for a friend and I’ve decided to make it an epic project of mass proportions. Pretty much its gonna pull together a lot of different skills. So far I’ve had to stain, burn and wear out paper and fabric, and I’ve also made a silkscreen that I’ll use on it later…Here’s a picture for you to stare and wonder at. It’ll be awesome to be able to hold a layout in my hands, y’know.

I’ll be sure to show you the final product.

Expect content.

Edit: New affie! Amelia at Hellyeahsalt.

Note—figmint.zzl.org will still be around—in fact, it will be identical to the top level domain, so you don’t really need to change your links.
If you’d like to always have an up to date link, you could also refer people to figmintdesigns.webs.com, which redirects to the current site url.