Recently in Designer Category

So here’s a fabulous new look for Disillusioned. I enjoy watching Ghost in the Shell, both shows and movies, and decided to finally do a layout featuring Motoko. I love the colors from the city so I decided to try out a pixel stretch as the background for the columns. I think it turned out well. I had to redo the selection a few times because I wanted to make sure everything lined up. I needed to have lights on both sides so that it wouldn’t look as if I lost part of the layout. Other than being a little bit iffy on the footer (I may redo it) I think the layout rocks.

More to come. Laters.

So I finally got SEO Designs up and running. Oh wait.. you’ll want a link to that right? SEO Designs. This is where I’ll be portraying old layouts used for Disillusioned and other blogs, old splash pages and the details that I can remember about making them.

This won’t impede anything shown here on Disillusioned because I’ll still upload graphics made from tutorials and photos, etc here. There’s also a new splash page in town, check it out: Sweetly-Evil.Org.

Nothing else going on right now other than getting the design for the design site working. Man that was a pain in the arse! I’m still having issues with the right menu, which is currently not showing since I am having problems with it. I use the same type of layout over and over again yet there is always an issue of some form that requires me to deviate for some reason. Yet I never find out why or what change it is that I make that all of a sudden makes it work because when I go to look at the other layouts everything is the same except some placement values and I know it isn’t that.

Anyway, enjoy!

Now that I have access to my precious Photoshop again and have downloaded quite a few fonts and some brushes to start that collection over, I decided to create something. I didn’t know what to do and was sort of bored and decided to look at all my fonts. After deleting the pixel-style fonts that are created after old receipt-style type or something like that I started playing around and this is what I came up with. Enjoy!

Or in other words, Goodbye & Good Evening (I’m trying to be proper here since I’m writing in the evening time, ok?). I’ve changed Bleach characters from one favorite (Yoruichi) to another favorite (Renji). Renji Abarai is the Vice-Captain of Squad 6 under Bakuya Kuchiki and tends to make me laugh at the strangest times. Unfortunately, although he’s getting more ‘airtime’ lately, he doesn’t get as much as I think he should. Hopefully he’ll get written in more often. He’s a pretty good character and I think they’ve done very well with his personality. He knows when it’s time to be serious and he can be very sensitive at times. Anyway, enough about my favorite characters. What show do you like (whether it be animated or not) and who’s your favorite character(s) and why?

I hope you enjoy the new layout and who knows, maybe since he’s made it to Disillusioned I’ll change the layout I have on Myspace. It’s been him forever there. But then it’s hard for me to find stuff I like. Enjoy and Later.

If you haven’t noticed I’ve been moving things around again, tweeking the widgets, adding stuff, removing stuff, changing dailies and so forth. It’s not as much as it sounds really. There are a few changes that you may or may not notice depending on how often you visit Disillusioned.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the ads. Yes, I know, it can be a bit much when there are ads, but I am trying to keep them to a minimum and trying to do different types on different pages. I have two right sidebar widgets now. On the main page you’ll see everything and if you click on a Category or Monthly link you’ll see fewer. This may be temporary and I may move the bulk of them to the sub-pages of the site.

I’ve moved the Social Widgets and some others back to the left side because the right column was growing due to the skyscraper ad. I shrunk the Amazon widget and changed it to randomize the books listed in the widget. I am thinking of adding more books or creating another Amazon widget for the sub-pages that will list different books I’ve read that aren’t completely of the adult dark fantasy genre.

I’ve added the ‘main’ link to the Category and Monthly pages. If you are new to Movable Type 4 you can do this by adding it on the Entry Summary template, not the Category and Monthly templates. I know, it’s a bit confusing. Just like the Meta Tags you want to add for Google and such go on the Header Template.

I’ve also created a page for Advertising on Disillusioned. It contains information on what types of advertising I am available for. There’s also two ways of contacting me by email and the comment form. Feel free to let me know if there are any questions.

I’m going to still work on lowering the amount of advertising. I wish the ContextAds with Linkworth would kick in, but apparently that is not happening. I don’t know why, the test worked and it took forever to make sure that it was working properly, that I had the code in the proper place, etc. The context ads are set up to show on the sub-pages (Category, Individual, Monthly) because I had to include the code in the Entry Summary Template instead of on the individual templates. That is the only place I could find that it would work in Test Mode and for some reason it still hasn’t kicked in. It worked just fine in the previous incarnation of MT and on Chelle’s Reading Corner when that was active. Perhaps I need to try another form of link advertising?

I’d appreciate it if anyone having issues would let me know via comments or email! Thanks.

So after making the butterfly wallpaper for myself I decided to make a wallpaper with a dragon for my Honey. He’s strange and has his resolution set to 1280x768. He says that it is the ultimate wide resolution for playing his games and it works best for him. Although I had to go find out what his resolution was in order to make his wallpaper. He didn’t know what it was, but then again neither did Little Lady when I made hers. I used brushes I found at Brusheezy, cloud renderings and gradients in order to make this wallpaper.

For some reason the Little Lady is obsessed with Los Angeles and until I told her I’d include the night shot I used previous (but this is a different one) in a wallpaper for her she didn’t want me to make her one. With all the lights you can’t see stars in the LA night sky, so I added some. Then she wanted a butterfly, too and wanted it to be purple. The butterfly is also from the Butterfly Garden brush set at Aethereality and the StarScape is the same one from what I used in my wallpaper. I used a gradient to make LA and some of the stars colorful. Her resolution is weird, too - 1280x960.

Do you enjoy making wallpapers or other types of graphics? Do you follow tutorials to make them or do you just play around until you find something you like? Later.