Site Redesign
Does this site look completely wonky to you? I’ve just implemented a new design! Most likely you’ve got some old files cached. Clear your cache and refresh (or, just refresh about 20 times and your browser will get the hint and clear the cache itself). Of course, you might also be using Internet Explorer 6, in which case my annoying alert dialog box should have already goaded you into upgrading. If that’s the case, enough said.
Does this site look a little wonky to you? In that case, then you are probably a better graphic designer than I and/or you’ve discovered that the new design isn’t 100% implemented yet. If I’m lucky, it’s the latter. At any rate, I’ve already spent far more time in the past 24 hours working on this than I’d have expected to, given the limited extent of the results, but I’m a little burned out, so I’ll be finishing a few things (like the background on the footer and a few other little graphical touches) over the next few days. Oh, and I’ve only done the bare minimum trying to update the “Offspring” pages to work with the new look. (It took me about an hour of hunting before I realized/remembered that some of the style settings for the gallery pages are actually in the plug-in settings in WordPress and not in the Gallery2 files at all.) But I am hoping to make the move from Gallery2 to the Dutch Monkey’s DM Albums plug-in soon anyway.
Comments
DutchMonkey said:
I like it! In fact, I LOVE it! I have to ask, though…did you intentionally make it look with Window Vista’s Aero theme, or is this an oversight (hopefully due to the fact that you’re lucky enough not to have used Vista)?
Love the transparencies, but then, I don’t mind them in 10.5, either. For me, though, before I mouse over the items in the “Blather” drop-down, the items appearing directly over the search box are hard to read. Maybe add a darker background to the search box?
If you’re planning on submitting your theme to WordPress (or making it available otherwise) I would be interested.
Nice work.
room34 said:
I have never seen Vista other than a few screenshots. I knew in going transparent that I was risking an unintentional Aero knock-off. I’m guessing I’ve slipped up with the color palette.
A little background on the design: I got the color scheme from Kuler, which is a really cool color scheme sharing site from Adobe. I’ve been leaning towards a color palette of this nature for a while, so when I saw this one on there, it was natural.
As for the swirly, bloppy image in the background, I generated that with a nifty little program called quadrium2. I haven’t actually registered it yet, so I sort of had to “hack” the image out of the app, but I may just have to pay for it; it can do all kinds of interesting image manipulations and you can combine its multitude of filters, textures, vectors and what it calls “vectures” in an infinite number of ways.
Regarding the menus, thanks for that input. I had been thinking the menus were maybe not opaque enough. I’ve got a few “utility” PNGs that I’m using for things like the background in the dropdown menus — they’re just 20×20 squares of a certain color and opacity level. I have black and white, each at 25%, 50% and 75% opacity. I’m using the 75% black image for the menu, then overlaying it again on mouseover. Maybe I need to create a 90% opacity image; even 75% is too translucent if there’s text under it.
As it is, I think it’s passable on all of the screens I’ve seen, although I haven’t tried it on a Mac with the default gamma; all of my screens are skewed as much as possible to the dark gamma of a standard crappy PC so I can have a good idea of what the “average” user will be seeing.
room34 said:
OK, I just created a 90% opacity background for the menus. Definitely an improvement. (The transparency, I’m noticing, is highly sensitive to your display’s gamma: the lighter the gamma, the [much] more transparent the alpha channel.)