The LJ REBOOT: Round 3 Entry!
What do you get when you cross a carnival with a bordello? My the_lj_reboot layout, that's what.
I've had this layout open in a tab of Firefox since early August as I worked on it nearly nonstop -- although the first two HTML mockups didn't work out so well. Which is probably the understatement of the year [although #2 looks massively better than #1, mainly because it's got some of the graphics from the final version integrated into it], but hey!
Things to Notice:
1. I went a little crazy with the hover effects. Everything from the subject to the links in the navbar to the userpic border changes in some way on hover.
2. Devil's in the details. Ignoring for a moment that Adrien Brody's gorgeous belly is portrayed in all its glory on this sucker, look at all the damask. ♥♥♥ And the little curlicues and dingbats in the [rotating!] image at the top of the navigation bar are love. So much love, in fact, that they're repeated again throughout the layout as ornaments for the subject line and, down at the bottom, as gigundoid ornamentation that really, you can only see well on a 1280+ resolution monitor.
3. Rotating images? Yes please. Refresh this LJ enough times in Firefox and you should see every image available in the rotating images script whatsit. Yay! [My favorite is "minorfourth has been a slasher since before she knew what slash is."]
4. Black and white and red all over. Might as well call these my theme colors, because I always seem to go back to them no matter what type of layout I'm making. Which is kinda weird, considering my favorite color's actually blue... but I guess most people aren't so pretty with the asphyxiated look going for them.
The Process:
After the first two big reveals at the_lj_reboot, I thought it'd be fun to challenge myself with a Rebooted layout of my very own. I immediately decided to go with Opal [Libra OSWD] as my base layout, because of all the layouts LiveJournal has available for use, I've found Opal to be the most flexible in terms of customizations. As you can tell, I customized like crazy.
I used halffling's base code as a starter point once I'd plotted out with plain-old HTML how I wanted my layout to appear, and from there the layout really took off. The header graphic came later in the process, after I'd started with the red and gray damask and the rotating images, because I felt like even though there was a lot going on, it really needed something to tie it all together. I added a footer later to bring the whole thing home.
As with all my headers, there wasn't really a process so much as a throwing things at it until something looks good.
There is a lot going on in this layout; that's another reason why I'm keeping the default comment pages up. For people with slow connections, I won't torture them by forcing them to load all the gimongous chunks of my header, plus all the other images used in the layout, every time they want to comment on my journal.
Because a lot of the layout is transparent *.png images, the best way to view it is definitely using Mozilla Firefox. I recommend checking it out with Firefox just once, even if you're a fervent Internet Explorer lover, because the pixeliness of the transparent *.gifs I coded in for IE viewers just don't do justice to their Firefoxian counterparts.
This whole experience has been super-fun for me. I'm hoping that the other participants enjoyed it just as much.
In conclusion: please check it out in Firefox. Just once. Please.
I've had this layout open in a tab of Firefox since early August as I worked on it nearly nonstop -- although the first two HTML mockups didn't work out so well. Which is probably the understatement of the year [although #2 looks massively better than #1, mainly because it's got some of the graphics from the final version integrated into it], but hey!
Things to Notice:
1. I went a little crazy with the hover effects. Everything from the subject to the links in the navbar to the userpic border changes in some way on hover.
2. Devil's in the details. Ignoring for a moment that Adrien Brody's gorgeous belly is portrayed in all its glory on this sucker, look at all the damask. ♥♥♥ And the little curlicues and dingbats in the [rotating!] image at the top of the navigation bar are love. So much love, in fact, that they're repeated again throughout the layout as ornaments for the subject line and, down at the bottom, as gigundoid ornamentation that really, you can only see well on a 1280+ resolution monitor.
3. Rotating images? Yes please. Refresh this LJ enough times in Firefox and you should see every image available in the rotating images script whatsit. Yay! [My favorite is "minorfourth has been a slasher since before she knew what slash is."]
4. Black and white and red all over. Might as well call these my theme colors, because I always seem to go back to them no matter what type of layout I'm making. Which is kinda weird, considering my favorite color's actually blue... but I guess most people aren't so pretty with the asphyxiated look going for them.
The Process:
After the first two big reveals at the_lj_reboot, I thought it'd be fun to challenge myself with a Rebooted layout of my very own. I immediately decided to go with Opal [Libra OSWD] as my base layout, because of all the layouts LiveJournal has available for use, I've found Opal to be the most flexible in terms of customizations. As you can tell, I customized like crazy.
I used halffling's base code as a starter point once I'd plotted out with plain-old HTML how I wanted my layout to appear, and from there the layout really took off. The header graphic came later in the process, after I'd started with the red and gray damask and the rotating images, because I felt like even though there was a lot going on, it really needed something to tie it all together. I added a footer later to bring the whole thing home.
As with all my headers, there wasn't really a process so much as a throwing things at it until something looks good.
There is a lot going on in this layout; that's another reason why I'm keeping the default comment pages up. For people with slow connections, I won't torture them by forcing them to load all the gimongous chunks of my header, plus all the other images used in the layout, every time they want to comment on my journal.
Because a lot of the layout is transparent *.png images, the best way to view it is definitely using Mozilla Firefox. I recommend checking it out with Firefox just once, even if you're a fervent Internet Explorer lover, because the pixeliness of the transparent *.gifs I coded in for IE viewers just don't do justice to their Firefoxian counterparts.
This whole experience has been super-fun for me. I'm hoping that the other participants enjoyed it just as much.
In conclusion: please check it out in Firefox. Just once. Please.