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.

Porfolio Mock-Up: Version 6 — A Gradient

It’s subtle.  I’m not sure about this yet.  It does seem to help the to bottom balance more.

Portfolio Mock-Up: Version 5

I made some minute changes to the home page.  I made the web design gallery look more structured, but less “boxy.”  I felt the full bleed title made the web page look top heavy so I trimmed a bit off.  I think the dark blue change from the earlier version, tones things down and let’s the stuff I’m trying to show be the focus.  At the side time, the webpage still looks like my colorful style.  I think I’m getting to the point where I like the design.  Let’s see what I think when I wake up in the morning.

ZHD Info Site v2

I thought the original concept for the info pages looked too much like Power Point Slides, so I redesigned the basic look to something like a fancy picture frame and I made the main page look more dramatic.

ZHD Info Site Version 1

Here’s version 1.  I decided the first background wasn’t interesting enough and didn’t represent the motifs in the manga.  So I changed the backgound to a pattern that is somewhat Arabic.

ZHD Info Site Mock-Up

I’m working my way back to doing my portfolio.  I’ve been spending lots of time looking at websites at Design Meltdown to get some inspiration.  I’ve also got some new Actionscript tricks up my sleeve to increase the possibilities.  My biggest stumbling block remains, though.  I need to maintain my style without letting the background overwhelm the work I want to present.

But before I get back to my portfolio, I must complete another project first.   This website will be an interactive informational website for “Zettai Heiwa Daisakusen.”  I decided not to do the website completely in Flash because of the “back button” problem.  So I will use the same strategy as “Snowball’s World” and embed separate Flash swf’s into HTML/CSS (and maybe some Javascript to preload assets and redirect folks on mobiles that don’t support Flash).  There will be 5 pages in total on this site.  I’m doing some mock-ups now to help me lay things out.  Here’s what I’ve got so far.  The site will intro with a little animation that gives the basic outline of the story and end with link to the main navigation page.  Here are the beginning and end of the sequence (It goes from a movie to an invitation).

Web Design Gallery v2

I started laying out the web design gallery using 400-px wide screen shots.  I soon realized that approach would be a bad because the viewer would have to navigate several pages to access the full portfolio.  So I decided to try an approach that would be a 1-pager.  Here’s what I came up with:

This will be a Flash page and it should be quick to execute because I already Action Script functions for buttons.  The problem is alway the metadata, so I will have to make use of alternative text and keywords for search.  Anyhow … as I do more web pages, I will keep this one page fresh with the best designs rather than showing everything I’ve done.

Portfolio Web Design Page Mock-Up

I decided to put the portfolio in the second Omari’s Sister layout format.   I think it fits well and it keeps a running look to all of my websites.  Here’s the home page again and the layout for the web design page.

I put in a horizontal menu bar under the title.  I worked a lot on the effects on the navigation highlight.  with a combination of shadows, highlights, and a very subtle gradient, I was able to make the highlight look like a soft rubbery piece of candy.  It’s hard to see in this small screen shot, so you’ll just have to wait.  Again, the pages look very textured and hand-crafted like they are made from craft paper.

Portfolio Home Page Mock-up

I finally have some time to make a portfolio website to hold examples of my various works of art and web designs.  Today, I worked on the mock-up of the home page in Fireworks.  Here’s what it looks like so far:

I’m thinking about doing most of the website in Flash — but in the way I did Snowball’s world — Flash components in an HTML wrapper.  I think the portfolio pages themselves will follow this same grid layout, with the exception of the Painting and Drawing gallery.  I will reuse the Flash gallery from the existing Omari’s Sister Website for that.  I hope to have this completed by sometime on Tuesday.  It will be a stretch with Mother’s Day, though.

Ouran Wallpaper Featuring Haruhi!

As I post this, I realize that I have no where on any of my formal websites to display this stuff. Yeeks, I’ll figure out something by the end of the week. Anyhow, here’s the Haruhi wallpaper. I like this image of her with sheep (mostly because I adore sheep). So I made the image to look like it was cut out of paper.  Here’s the original image:

This was tough because the image quality was very poor from the original manga magazine.

Here are some links to the nether regions of one of my websites. I’ll update this once I get something formal going.

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