[Portfolio] Not Alex Ltd.

Not Alex Ltd. A website where a guy named Kevin wrote about life, similar to what I do in my literature blogs. Random junk. He needed a great design to string everything together. Gladly, I was able to help.

The design is one of my more colorful ones, proving that, yes, I can do colorful designs and not just monochrome and super-simple. Grass, great typography, and cheese mix together to make one great theme.

Any inspiration?

During the beginning of the design when I talked with Kevin, we talked about two possible design choices. Kevin was interested into computers (Macs only) and coding, and he had been doing some experimenting of his own with CSS in his spare time.

We brought along two design choices in the end: either a shiny, sleek, gradient-filled Apple-like design that would bring out his technological side, or we could settle with a green, fun-filled, childish-looking yet modern design.

Kevin decided that there was already too much sleek and shiny in his life and asked me to make a hybrid between the two, leaning very heavily towards the grassy design.

I still managed to incorporate some high-tech design in the header of the design by adding some gears, hexagons, and other interesting things in the header to appeal to his high-tech side.

The grass tiling background.

The background image is a image I found off from stock.xchng and it is definitely proving to be very useful. The original image looks not very different from the one I created, but unfortunately didn’t repeat horizontally. I had to Photoshop it so that the grass would repeat decently in the background.

I wouldn’t say that the task was hard, but I will say that it was definitely interesting. This is the third project I have done that has required repeating backgrounds.

The background, however, was the only case in this project where I used stock images like so. I try to keep down the number of images used.

The header.

The header was definitely fun to make. I used various brushes in Photoshop, including these brushes by Obsidian Dawn, which were definitely cool to use. I thank them greatly for creating such an amazing piece of work.

The font used in the design is called Anonymous Clippings and is by Centric Studios. I used Photoshop to spiff it up a bit, adding outer glows as well as other filters and effects.

Star-trek Style Fade at the Bottom?

The Star-Trek style fade out at the bottom was completed by overlaying a <div> and it had a very high z-index, which allowed it to stay on the top. It had a background image that was a gradient fading out into white.

The technique doesn’t quite work with Internet Explorer 6, and I could use one of the many PNG hacks on the Internet that can be found by Googling for them, but recently I have been increasingly shunning Internet Explorer and urging users to upgrade to a better browser.

For the reason, the design breaks quite visibly and largely in IE6. The sidebar is shunned down, but I didn’t bother fixing it. I didn’t want to deliberately fowl up viewing like many websites have done, but I did add a upgrade notice urging people to upgrade.

What’s next?

Kevin may choose to phase out my design in maybe decades or as soon as a year. As he is licensed to use the design, it’s out of my control and I don’t care. I know Kevin personally, he is a good friend, and we had a great time designing the website together.

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