New Wallpaper!
It’s been a while since I made wallpaper. Here are some based on original art from “Junketsu + Vampire” by Aya Shouto and “Ouran High School Host club” by Bisco Hatori.
This first one required some “repainting” to remove the Japanese text. I also applied noise reduction filters to get rid of the screen dots and the artifacts from the backside image. To give it a painted effect I flattened some of the image details and applied a canvas texture. The “leather” like frame was a happy accident.
For this wallpaper, I smoothed out the original screen dots and generated new ones in the background. I also applied some drop shadows to make the foreground images looks as though they we cut from paper. Lots of careful filtering was used to restore the hand drawn look.
Omari’s Sister Anime and Manga Blog Update
I finally updated the graphics for my anime and manga blog. The structure of the new format came from a template I downloaded from Deluxe Templates. Because I have so many widgets, I wanted a 3 columns layout so I could place more widgets “above the fold.” After downloading and activating the new template, I changed the dimensions of some of the divs to accommodate my widgets and to please my eye. Today I finally put my own graphics on top of the structure from the template. By far, it took longer to find a suitable template than it did to create and implement the new graphics. Here’s the mock-up I worked from:
And here’s a screen shot of the final implementation:
Here’s a link to the actual website: Link
Final Porfolio Homepage Mock-Up
I’m now in the process of creating the graphics from this mock-up and setting up the basic webpage structure. Most of this will become a template for the other pages in the site. I think this captures my colorful and playful spirit. It should really come to life when the Flash is active. It’s been a real struggle for me to let loose my true spirit. I think my playfulness is my strength and that I really would rather work on playful sites rather than serious. I don’t know how this will work out career wise, but I believe I should follow my heart and express my true nature. This has also taking me a lot longer than I anticipated, but I think needed to take my time and dig deep into my soul. A big part of me is eternally a child and I should treasure that wonderful part of myself 
.
When I get done will this, I will completely redo my translation website to showcase my fan-art and fan translation hobby. I think I really should go “bold” like a manga magazine. I imagine this will take me a while to do, so I consider my project for 2010.
Sugar Sugar Rune, Project 3
I’m starting my third “Sugar Sugar Rune” project. The drawings from that manga are sooo very lovely, that I can’t help but to want to color them in. Here’s the image I’ve chosen for this project and the cleaned up line art.
For this one I want to push the 3D paper look. The image already suggests that, now I just have to punch it up. I’ll post my progress. The first thing is to figure out how to divide the image in different foreground and background planes. I’m itching to play with the shimmer in the dresses! I love punching-up other people’s artwork .
Getting Closer on the Portfolio Homepage
I felt the center panel looked way too plain, so I added a picture. This drawing of cat contains a big part of my spirit — playful and a little wicked ;p. It also reinforces my strengths as a designer. I’m learning to embrace my cute affliction, so I feel like I should let it loose. I feel that this is getting closer to something I like and it will do for now so I can get to doing other parts of my portfolio site.
Moving Forward with Portfolio Homepage
I’m finally moving forward on the homepage for my porfolio. Here’s what the current Mock-up looks like:
The frame is composed of very small tiled images, so text I turned into an image to preserve the effects, and two Flash elements. Here’s a link to play with the left menu Flash Element:
Link (Click away, but it’s not connected to anything yet.) I will do a a couple of little Javascript rollovers for the Contact me link and the link back to omarissister.com. I could do the same thing for the Flash elements, but I’m a little worried about responsiveness and I can make the elements look “slicker” in Flash. I’m still not happy with middle, but I have the text I want convey there as a place holder.
I decided not to fight my innate style and go with the colorful construction paper/childlike arts and craft look. I suppose, I really would like to design websites that cater to the young and folks that like cute rather than design sterile looking “businessy” website. Still, though, I don’t want to be pigeon-holed.
After this, I need to redo my translation website into something with more punch, pink, and playfulness. I also need to accommodates my scanlations. It would be nice if I made an embedded reader so folks can’t easily download and then upload my work without my permission. Plus, it will be easier for the folks that visit my website.
Sigh … I’ve got a lot of work to do. But it should be all down hill with respect to my portfolio once I get the frame into HTML/CSS. Because the site will be modular, I can then just plug in the different elements I’ve already made.
Fireworks has been a great tool to Mock-up the websites and to create the graphic elements. It has some nice file saving features that allowed me get the images into very small file sizes (some of them are less than 1KB!!!) while balancing image quality. I like it for this purpose more than Photoshop.
Adding “Snap” to Flash Buttons
I experimented today with ways to add a little “pop” or “snap” to my buttons.
Link to “snappy button experiment”
The image buttons are live, but the download links are not connected yet. However, you can see those links react when you roll-over them and click on them.
Here are some other buttons I made over a year ago. Not so “snappy” hmm…
I added “snappiness” to the other galleries I just completed. So what did I do? I slightly dscreased the spread the drop shadows and I slightly scaled down the images on rollover. The changes are no larger than 3-pixels for each button.
Ouran Wallpaper: Accidental Kiss
Here’s is a wallpaper I made of Tamaki and Haruhi’s accidental Kiss. I decide to go with the feel of ice-cream. I don’t really know why — perhaps because it’s summer and ice-cream would be great right now.
Wallpaper Portfolio
I’ve changed my mind again on Flash. After going through some of the preliminary work, I found that it would be very difficult to do the wallpaper portfolio in JavaScript and have it look like it is uniform with the other parts of my portfolio. The main sticking points are the special effects and keeping the file size reasonable. Basically, to keep the drop shadows and the glow in JavaScript, I would have to use PNG format or I would have to make one big JPEG of the page and display in slices to maintain the gradient in the back ground. The PNG file sizes are not practical and the slices for variable images would be very hokey and difficult to pull off cleanly. So, I’m leveraging the web design porfolio Flash gallery and merely exchanging the images. I hope to be done by the end of the week. I will only be able to squeeze in about 1-hr/day this week because I’m swamped with real life. I still may add some variety by making the menu bar horizontal. We’ll see … Actually, it’s not that bad adding images in ActionScript. It’s mainly copying and updating file names.
As for JavaScript … well, waiting for CSS3 for the special effects.
Mock-up Gallery for Displaying Wallpaper
Here’s what I have so far.
Most of the wallpaper I make is in widescreen format, so the vertical menu would not work as well as a horizontal menu. The question is which technology shall I use. I can make effects easier with Flash, but if I use Javascript, then I can make it more extendable and automated. I think in this case, I will try the javascript approach and have some fun playing with visibility. For selection, I will do a simple border. It should be a nice exercise. I will start planning the code tomorrow.
