Mnemosyne
Current: Love Notes
July, 2007 ~ • feat. Art by "IIIS in 'The best illustrations of comicfans magazine collection'" (from layout index) • designed by Aethereality
So it's been more than a year since my first self-made layout. During that time, I had thought that I would improve on my coding/Photoshop skills and make at least one more layout, but I guess that didn't happen. Too busy? Lack of motivation? Typical excuses. I wanted to try the Vistered Little theme (first found at Ivyscan), but it was too complicated. I thought too, that I would try out some Vector graphics with Adobe Illustrator, but again, I wasn't motivated. Then I thought that I would go back to finally using Aetherality's Restrospect, which I had downloaded around the same time as Layout I (oh how quick and painless putting up this layout was, compared to back then!), but didn't feel like it. I guess that's more a winter theme to me. I wanted something white with a lot of space for clarity? I had wanted Aetherality's Finesse...it's one of their layouts that I had been in love with for a long time, but I had heard that iframes don't work with blogs? All this is a repeat of Dustbox/Dustbird's entry...guess I haven't changed much in a year, huh? No matter. I like this one a lot (my one discontent is the scroll bars, but that's a browser thing more than a layout thing). But because the content area is very minimalistic, I made a conscious decision to drop a lot of things (bye bye icons for --- if the longevity of Layout II is any indication of things to come --- at least a year!). If you look through the older posts, you will find that a lot of them would not fit as well, and may even look messy; this is something that I have been encountering as I have tried out different layouts. I think this neatness is what attracted me to this layout though. It's so beautiful. Thank you again, Aetherality!
II: DustBox v.1//Dustbird
I was really keen on making layouts myself and since I had some spare time on my hands after exams, I decided to give it a go. Originally, I had meant to replace NightWish with Finesse or Retrospect (also from Aethereality), but I think I was (mistaken?) into thinking that iframes wouldn't work with blogs or something. I really liked NightWish, but felt that it was time for a change, and I wanted a wider content area just so I can fit Youtube vids and stuff =P Originally, I had meant to design a QingHong layout but couldn't really think of a nice one, then I had stumbled upon a Nana pic that I hadn't really thought of using before, but the idea became far too complicated for my fledgling Photoshop and CSS skills. A little disheartened by that time, I switched to trying my hand at making Winamp skins---->another miserable failure, and so I came back to playing around with a layout, taking one of my lomographs.
If you go to my lomohome you will find the original of this photo and see that it's quite different. It's one of my best ever lomographs and I really love it, and I hadn't meant to change too much of the photo, but again, playing around with the Photoshop layers effects led me to this and well, I'm liking it! ^___^
I left v1 on it since I have the feeling that I will be tweaking this quite a bit as my CSS knowledge improves. There are a few things that I'm not that happy with, such as the font (I'd like the heading font to be the same as the Dustbox font), the types of bullets (I wanted it to be a sort of cursive flourish/deco) and I also wanted the permalink to act as a hover reaction instead of a hyperlink (ie I wanted the actual permalink to show when the mouse hovers over it), but it will have to do for now. I also wanted to experiment with a bit of a 'washed' effect on the background, with 2 1-lined cross over patterns (a repeat floral, a larger version of the ideal bullet). Also, I think that the coding's not too efficient and more than a little messy, but that will have to be improved in the future, right now I'm pretty happy with what I've got~ I have to thank the tutorial at Celestial-Star. So far, it's the best tutorial that I found, covering both the Photoshop and CSS stuff for extreme newbies like me xP. Also, this thread helped me solve my FF vs IE padding problem ^___^ Like I said, the coding is kinda messy =P and especially on this page, you might notice an additional html body tag for vlink etc (thanks to this page) because on IE, an ugly blue border shows on the linked images on this page =/
I: NightWish
July, 2006 ~ May, 2007 • feat. Yuko from xxHOLiC © CLAMP • Designed by Aethereality
This was my first ever blog layout and the first layout that I had ever used, so I did come across a few problems that were fixed ^___^ I really liked it well, because it was pretty and all that (I like the colour blue =P ). I couldn't decide between this one and Restrospect (also by Aethereality) but because I had some problems uploading Retrospect, I just used NightWish instead. I love this layout, but my biggest complaint would be the width of the content area...I can't fit Youtube vids T_____T
