I noticed my latest desktop update was a bit old, so here is a new one, showing my desktop with all hidden, while browsing and last but not least while I’m designing.
Enjoy.
Click for Full “Browsing” Click for Full “Designing”
As usual the full sized images are 5040×2500 at 2.2MB, they’re not for the faint of heart or thin on bandwidth, click the thumbnails for a 1400px wide version.
I got quite attached to both designs I made, the square one isn’t as polished nor refined as the rounded “classic” one that’s gone through a long list of revisions and tweaks.
I did something quite bold but so far it feels like it’s paying off, I mixed aspects of both designs into a hybrid style:
+
=
Click for Full view.
Comments are as always greatly appreciated.
Long story ahead: I had a surfing accident years ago and hit my upper jaw on the board when falling off, my 2 front teeth were 45° inwards and one of the teeth next to them was knocked out, had to swim 200m~ to shore with a board in tow, a tooth and a considerable amount of blood washing around in my mouth along with salt water getting into the wounds, suffice to say I don’t surf anymore and my canine is now next to my dead and root filled front teeth.
2 months ago while eating breakfast a part of my tooth broke off with a loud snap, didn’t hurt (the benefit of dead teeth…) two days later I had a dentist replace the missing part with some clever plastic that hardens under ultraviolet light.
As you can see on krill3.com/blog/mods/ I got a jacket with wiring I made myself for my old Sony Ericsson z800i, well I got a Nokia n73 (lovely phone by the way) so I had to rip half of the wires out and re-do it, I bought a Nokia AD-46 as a base for the new portion of the mod:
I’m not a tall man and with the microphone part at your collar (where it should be) the connector end is waist level, and my phone is in my pants pocket, 5cm short of it and I’d like 10cm added to that so I can raise it to see the screen.
I cut it in half, stripped the very soft rubber and paper (?) to find nine leads in there… I knew I had quite some work ahead of me, I don’t have a wire stripper, I use a knife, scissors or in a pinch my teeth instead, I’m currently halfway through the soldering but paused to post this photo:
Yes said plastic bit didn’t like being used as a wire stripper…
Guess I’m heading back to the dentist sooner than I’d like.
I hope my dentist & insurance company doesn’t read this blog. *whistles*
I’m having a hard time picking what theme to progress with, I was set on using the rounded one but inspiration rushed into the room and demanded to be heard, 30 mins later I’m now sitting with 2 designs, the square one is really early so judge the layout and composition of it not the details.
Which do you prefer? Please leave a comment with your pick and why.
vs
Click for Full view.
A mockup of the current state of my theme, I’ve gone for a separated “bubble” style with fluid height of the bubbles containing the blog posts and fixed dimensions on the header/nav and footer, as always comments are greatly appreciated.
New
Old
A simple preview of the second version of my theme in progress with a screenshot of the old version for comparison, it’s in a quite early stage but it should give a good idea of the direction I’m taking the design in, it’s 560px wide thus a 640px wide screen + vertical scrollbar and side borders fits nicely, my old theme was 800px wide, I had good intentions with that width but forgot about the scrollbar and borders… thus it didn’t fit on 800×600 screens.
It’s a bit more simplistic than the old theme, the sidebar was neat looking but not perfect, the “sidebar” will now replace the logo and top part when needed.
And yes I know the thumbs doesn’t fit this theme, not to worry, my theme is wider.
I finally got myself a proper host instead of running the site from my home server, the site has grown in size and complexity and has gone from a test platform for my designs into an actual website, so I decided a host was in order, I settled on dreamhost after asking around what host people recommend.
Expect a transition period with intermittent odd behavior and appearance of the site, my own theme is back on the drawing board, I got a couple of modifications and improvements in the works, meanwhile I picked a decent enough wordpress theme. “Day Dream 0.5 by Jim Whimpey” it’s a lot narrower than mine had and will have, thus the thumbs are too big, will only be an issue until I bring my new and improved theme online.
The navigation is now done, the gallery page doesn’t exist yet so getting a 404 is normal, the contact page hasn’t been given an overhaul yet, it’s next.
Done the contact page, not too sure how much to put there, I want people to be able to get in touch with me but posting my phone number online doesn’t feel… right.
The sidebar is part of the template I made for the site, not a lot of work to remove it on the other pages but that would shift the site sideways on those pages, or make it non-centered, neither option is ideal, the best solution would finding an actual use for it on the other pages, but I can’t come up with one currently.
The header backgrounds are done, in all their randomized glory.
Navigation is coming along nicely.
I sometimes get carried away when I get on a roll with my designs, woke nice and early and kept going, didn’t even pause for coffee and breakfast, everything was going well and I had the new non flash header completed to the point I could start spitting out all the images for the randomizer script, then guess what happens? PC froze, (my own fault, I had tinkered some with the overclocking and it seems got a bit zealous) and since I got the habit of saving when I’m done and about to close photoshop, yes you guessed it, lost all of it, 2-3 hours of work gone. I went upstairs and ate breakfast and got some coffee (good for morale) went a lot faster the second time around, I remembered the gist of it, I can’t recall names nor phone numbers, but photoshop settings, layer effects etc all stay vivid in my mind months after doing the initial design.
As you can see above I’ve gotten to the same point I was then, this is the basic image without the backdrop photo, I’ll start making the 20~ individual images for the randomizer in a bit, the navigation will be much like the old style showing the active page, I really like flash but realized that a 500KB .swf isn’t an option on a site hosted on a DSL connection, thus the return to xhtml/css/png navigation.
The current header is just and image, it will of course have the same navigation as the flash had once completed.
Before I succumbed to the sweet embrace of sleep I finished the comments section and made quite a lot of progress on the sidebar.
