Just so this blog doesn’t feel left out when it comes to blog designs I’ve neglected for a long time, I have to say that my computer/video gaming blog is in sore shape when it comes to overall design. When I made it, I just wanted to write posts every now and then about my games, as well as have a place for character biographies and stories and whatnot. I really had no idea at the time about how I wanted it to look, so I just made it something basic, played with the colors a bit, formatted it just a tad, and thus it’s remained in that same state since it’s beginning.
Lately, while working on what I want to do with this blog, and playing around with my new Photoshop Elements, I was suddenly inspired with a design idea for that blog. It will involve pink, chrome, and some wacky 1950′s science fiction type stuff. It will also definitely be a challenge for me to try to pull off since the design will be more elaborate than what I’ve done so far, and who knows at this point if what I have in my head will translate well to a web site. But I’m excited about it and will see just what takes shape. I’m just happy that I finally have an idea for it that I like.
I haven’t really been in a huge rush with my blogs though….which is obvious due to the length of time I can go between posts or even fiddling with how things are arranged on the site…so this new idea will still end up being a slow work in progress as I try things out and possibly go through more periods of neglect due to shifting priorities. I do enjoy my little web playground, so that’s the whole point I suppose!
So one of the first things I did is start to look up Photoshop chrome tutorials, and I found a pretty nice one that involved making an imaginary “MP4″ interface. Since it was a tutorial for full Photoshop and not Elements, I had to modify a few things as I went along so that I could get it done in Elements. And of course, I wanted to try out making it pink! You can see my completed result below. The earlier photo shows one of the intermittent steps of making the interface. You can click on them to see them at full size if you want a better look.
I plan on finding and completing a few more chrome tutorials so I have an even better feel for how I want to use the chrome feature in my design idea, so I may end up posting a few more chrome experiments here as I go along.
For this blog, I still have a good bit of formatting I want to do. The email subscription box is bland, so needs to be spiced up. I need to work on the slider to get it to the speed I want, and then use it for other things besides placeholder Sims 3 screenshots. The categories list also needs more help since right now it’s just a basic HTML bulletted list. Some categories are also duplicated to some degree, so I want to pare those down as well as sort through all the random tags I’ve used in my posts.
One big revamp I have planned is to completely redo my “About” page. When I first added it, I just put in whatever information I could think of using when I first made the blog, with plans to redo it “later”. Well, later is a lot closer to now! I’ve actually made a start on it on a private page, so there’s progress even if the only person who can see it at the moment is me. There are still more plans and details in the works, but one step at a time!
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