New Year Design Resolutions

My design resolutions (no design pun intended) for 2007.

Design for fluidity

Designing fluid layouts is the way forward in web design. Designing for the browser window rather than the monitor size and screen resolution. Graphically, this presents both limitations and new design challenges. I’d rather learn to find solutions to designing for fluidity rather than stick to a fixed layout that allows me to show off my design skills without limitation.

Focus on the graphics

Recently, I’ve focused on CSS and XHTML, opening up my graphics program to work on colours, and editing pre-existing images. I haven’t really applied myself to create anything unique, or spent hours working on specific design elements. When I first developed a taste for web design, I’d spend hours working on a banner, or designing icons, but lately I have become impatient and have lacked direction. I need to rebuild my skills, experiment more, follow more tutorials, and regain my confidence. Lack of confidence hurts my work the most. Also, I’d like to work with photos, more. I’m not so keen on using other people’s work, rather it’s time I splashed out on a digital camera.

Design shortcuts

It’s difficult when coming up with a new layout, not to fall into the trap of recycling design elements, such as glossy effects, dropshadows, rounded corners, reflections, etc, etc. I’m not planning on eliminating these design elements altogether. Rather, to use them purposely in relation to the design when and where they’re needed, rather than rely on them just to jazz things up.

Merry Christmas and happy new year to one and all. Hope you have lots of wonderful ones.

Mythological Victim Site Re-design

Mythological Victim is the first Site I created for the Web. I had pretty much given up on it, as it has received little interest, deciding instead to merge the material (along with another blog) into one mythology blog.

However, I really can’t let go of this one. The subject was why I started using the internet in the first place, and next to Web Design it is the only thing I really enjoy working on. And, really, I’m not entirely bothered if it’s a success or not, given the subject matter, I don’t really expect a smash hit or anything, it’s a personal passion.

I’ve worked on it almost solidly over the past week, and have pushed myself to come up with a quality design. Unlike a lot of creative types, I’m not a perfectionist, and as a result, my designs tend to suffer. The same can be said for this design, although I have spent more time working on graphical elements than I have on anything I’ve made in recent months, i’m happy with the results, concidering I’m a bit out of practice.

I’ve gone for a single column fluid layout this time around. I didn’t plan the layout, I just dived right in, and down the line I ran into a few problems, and so the CSS is a bit messy in places. One thing I’ve learned is the need to spend more time working with forms. I’ve been trying to cut down on the number of divisions used, but I think this has caused my overall markup, esp the css, to suffer. In the future, I’ll plan a sensible template structure, rather than trying to cut down on code.

I pixeled a favicon image, and quite liked the design, so I whipped out the pen tool, and turned it into a logo :D. I’ll most likely make a few modifications some time soon. I’m not sure about one or two things, so I’ll just see how it goes. I’ll leave things as they are for now though. Problems tend to pop up when I least expect them while surfing my sites. So far, it seems like I’ve got everything covered, although there’s usually something I’ve missed.

Mini Banners

A selection of mini-banners I’ve designed over the past couple of years. A few of them where for some personal sites, and various forums including ocgfx. The Middle-earth RPG banner is the earliest one I made, created in Microsoft paint, and animated using a couple of programs called
UnFREEz and MERGE. The Excoboard banner is unoffical. I made it for my own forum, but I soon saw it on a few other boards too.