dandyman.us

Lots to Do in Dandyland

// September 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Photoshop, Web

Things have been crazy for me lately and there is “Lots to Do in Dandyland” these days. The following is just a quick run down on what I’m up to.
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Notepad Mayhem

// August 25th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Web

When I selected the ‘Notepad Chaos‘ theme (by Evan Eckard) for dandyman.us, I knew that the background had to go. What I didn’t realize was just how daunting of a task that would be. You see the original theme used some really huge images, very little transparency, and most of those images were not easily customized.

The first problem I encountered was the way in which the background was constructed. Rather than using transparency on many of the images, Evan simply cut the graphics from the PSD file with the background still behind them. This can be a minor pain in the ass if your goal is to modify the theme to use a tiled background. In the end, I had to recreate a number of the images as PNGs (I hate GIFs) with transparency. While this can pose problems with IE6 and some other older browsers, I really don’t care. On this site, IE6 is dead.

Issue number two was that the design featured a monumentally large background image on the entire top half of the page. The search box, navigation post-its, title block, recent posts, about 1/3 of the notebook and the entire background from there up were all one image. Other than completely screwing up my vision of a tiled background it made the load time a little sluggish. The first order of business was carving up that giant image in to smaller, more manageable pieces. I created all new sub-images and modified the layout to free the various elements from each other. The end result, being that the layout and overall design is much more flexible.
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Blank Sheet of Paper

// August 21st, 2008 // No Comments » // Web

Just the other day, I said to myself, “Self, I think its time for a fresh, new start on dandyman.us.” So I started with a clean new install of WordPress and started looking for a fresh, new theme to build the new and improved dandyman.us. Now, I freely admit that completely nuking the site and starting from a completely blank slate was a bit drastic, but I really wanted to shake things up and head in a new direction.

The new theme is a beautiful theme developed by Evan Eckard for (and released by) Smashing Magazine. Now, I immediately loved the look of the theme, but just could not get over the default background. Seeing as the design was centered around the whole notebook metaphor, I opted to change out the background for the cliche, but classic wood desktop. I’ll probably add additional graphical elements over time, but for now I’m keeping it simple. I’m not sure how long this particular theme will last, but I learned a lot dissecting it and changing out some of the graphical elements.