March 05, 2012

Rocky Creations

My brother Joe, like my brother David and I, lives the life of destiny and wonder – that of an internet artisan. Joe’s an animator and artist. I mean, check this out:

My brothers are so damn amazing.

He’s at the Game Development Conference in San Francisco this week, and ahead of that, I built him a portfolio website. It’s an HTML/CSS with a little bit of javascript and php. Inspired by his logo, the eponymous Rocky the Gorilla himself, (The Hobbes to his Calvin…) I built a website around some motifs he liked.

Please, check out his website, have a look at his work – there are some really great nuggets in there.

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February 17, 2012

Omaha Jitterbugs Has a New Website

The Omaha Jitterbugs are a fantastic organization and a danciful group of people. It’s my dance home. One of my martial arts teachers once told me that you owe your art everything you receive from it. It’s a principle I try to carry with me wherever I go, to pay back the good that I’ve got. And so when I had the opportunity to design a new website for the Omaha Jitterbugs I felt very excited. I could use my powers for good and help a wonderful organization and all the hard-working people there have a web presence that would show all who visited their vibrancy and spirit.

My broad goals for the new website were:

Look awesome
Easy to use

And more specifically:

Direct new dancers to Get Started resources right away
Keep an active calendar and class schedule
Integrate their very effective use of Facebook
Showcase their cornerstone night, Jitterbugs Night Out every Friday
Provide a headquarters for their volunteer team Jive
Have a bright, somewhat retro look, that feels exciting and classy

I am not primarily a web programmer but I do have ever more growing experience configuring WordPress to fit purposes other than a blog. I love it as a CMS. So my plan was to build the website with WordPress, customize a premium theme from Elegant Themes, and configure it to fit the needs of the Jitterbugs.

Before I got online, I spent time sketching out an organizational structure for the website and talking to the people who’d be using the site the most. Then I gathered ideas for color schemes, fonts and typography options, and all the copy I would need (and there was ample, well-written copy already at the old site). I began the build first by installing and configuring WordPress without worrying too much about what it looked like.

Elegant Themes already have some great functionality built in, but I did want to incorporate a few plug-ins:

Calendar by Kieran O’Shea which allows users to easily style and manage multiple calendars and events.
Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk which provides easy installation and maintenance of GA
Google Analytics Dashboard by Carson McDonald which installs a great dashboard widget
WP-Table Reloaded by Tobias Bathage, a nice plug-in for maintaining and styling large tables – vital for the volunteer area HQ.

Check It Out!

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September 08, 2011

RPG Rating: New Fall Look

Inspired once again by the amazing Codrops resources, RPG Rating got a new design. I got to hunker down and do more with CSS than I did the last time I put the site together.

Check it out:

Instead of using Cufon font replacement as I have in the past, this time I used Google Web Fonts. Talk about easy! It’s so easy to call the font up like normal CSS without having to do some strange Cufon configuration, and I can now highlight the text like real text.

One thing I implemented this time, an idea I got from my blog’s skin, is two overlapping backgrounds for the primary content div. There’s a 1px by 1px alpha transparent grey background (you can still see the stripes through it), and then aligned to the left is that stripe of bokeh glowing rainbow that I like using for RPG Rating. Thought that looked cool.

I also did a lot more with formatting tables with CSS that I didn’t last time. I really wanted to showcase the four tiers and make a very easy to read table of what each content rating is defined as.

I carried the same bright colors and table look into the actual creation form. That was pretty fun, switching from simple drop-down menus to radio buttons spread out in a more visually pleasing away – again tying the four color experience into creating the rating.

I created the RPG Rating back in November-ish, and it’s great to see it becoming an oft-used resource. I’m not exactly sure what’s to be done with it next – I’m hoping to get some cooperation from some of the big directories so that people can more easily search for an RPG within their rating preferences.

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April 18, 2011

New Blog Face

The ol’ artblog has a new face! About a week ago I cashed in on my membership at Press75, and installed and modified their Attache theme. It’s pretty cool – it’s got this built in thingy where the featured image from the post goes in a stack over there on the right. I create the featured images manually, but you don’t have to; they can pull them from any image you’ve got uploaded. It’s actually kind of a fun brain exercise to flex the design muscles to come up with an image to an otherwise words-only kind of post. The art posts really take care of themselves, but dance posts and role-play posts not so much.

This is the first time I’ve changed the theme on this blog ever! I was startled to realize I’d started a blog in September 2009 and … I am still posting in it. I think that’s pretty good. When I first started I didn’t really know anything about WordPress or CSS or anything, and I essentially was just using the free theme as is. Granted, it’s a pretty good theme with really nice, flexible functionality (Piano Black by mono-lab), so a lot of customization wasn’t really called for. I eventually learned out to replace some images, and to change some of the text options. (Techniques learned mostly from modifying Simple Machines Forum themes, which we use at Absit Omen RPG.)

But we’re in modern times now, and I’ve been makin’ websites and donking about with CSS and WordPress plenty, so I embarked on the most arduous of tasks – designing for myself.

I wasn’t actually disatisfied with Piano Black; I really just wanted to try something new to try something new. I rifled through the themes at Press75, looking for functionality first, aesthetics second.

Functionality

Based on art
Easy to organize and show categories and tags
Simple layout

Aesthetics

I like the bright colors on a dark background
It was actually pretty easy to bring over the dual background images from Piano Black, so it feels like home.

The hard part of all of this was actually trying to decide what I wanted. Back in the day I was limited by what I knew how to do – how can I get close to what I want? But now, it’s more like… I don’t really care what my blog logo looks like. :P

My modifications are mostly about changing color and just a little bit of layout changes, especially in the single view.

Cufon

I’ve been working with Cufon font replacement and I like it. I’ve seen other people doing font replacement a lot better out there, so that’s one of my goals. But WordPress has a neat plug-in that does just about everything for me, so it’s easier than doing it by hand in a regular website.

Lacking

Apparently this theme lacks… pagination at this point. Looking forward to that update…

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January 21, 2011

RPG Rating Redux

I did a full redesign of my Universal RPG Rating System website! You can read more about the whole system here. I’m really pleased that the system seems to be working its way through the community, gradually replacing the useless and horrible Motion Picture Association of American ratings which are the worst. And so extremely lacking in value for online rpgs. I could go on, but I already did.

I started off with a big flashy new logo design. It’s graphic, it’s loud, it’s got the four ratings on it. It does distinctly lack that ursine quality we’d come to know and love, but this way it’s more compact and easy to recognize.

I’ve learned more about website programming for the World Wide Web since I first created the site as my first official site-making experiment in November. I was pretty jazzed to not only flex my strengthening skills as a designer for the web, but to not fail at coding! It took me only one day to make the website up from scratch again so that’s pretty exciting.

The biggest most obnoxious thing is still CSS positioning. It’s like some horrible piece of nonsense-language. Like the Dark Speech of Mordor which I dare not utter, not even here.

I’m kind of into bokeh right now? I used this tutorial to create an awesome bokeh brush for Photoshop. The sliding menus are from Codrops.

There has been a touch of controversy surrounding the origins of this system, which is too bad. I’ve been incorrectly accused of stealing it from an rpg resource community, and the thread in question is now unavailable. But everything about this system are my original ideas and no images or text passages were taken from anyone else. I discussed this system on that rpg resource community but I only utilized my contributions to that discussion. That resource community implemented a similar system from that discussion, but I didn’t agree with how they did it. My motivations in creating and propagating this system is purely to provide a useful service for role-players and certainly not to support the politics of competing resource communities. The fewer obstacles between admins and this system, the more successful it will be and the most people will benefit from it. So that’s where I’m at.

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November 29, 2010

I Made Little Pictures

We’re remodeling over at Absit Omen and in the process I made some new ‘message icons’ they’re called. There are a zillion categories of icons and buttons and images and junk that go into a Simple Machines Forum and there are just so many. But I dove in and realized that with the default shapes in Photoshop you can make some pretty classy little icons.

I had such a good old cheeky time that I made a set for my artblog here so you can easily navigate around the topics that are important to me. Look over there to the right and click one!

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November 09, 2010

New Website Officially Live!

This project’s been in the works for around a month I think, but finally! New business identity, new website, new domain! Everything is primed and ready to… keep doing what I was doing before. Except this time, with more bears and more stylized fire.

My new website is at www.SarahCarneyCreative.com and this blog is now at www.ArtBlog.SarahCarneyCreative.com. Update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

I yoinked the sweet dynamic menu from Codrops. They have some amazing stuff there. And thanks to Lisa at Four Lights who answers all my questions.

And so here’s the plug:

I want to help you with your art or design or writing (or goggles!) project.

Illustration, maps, character art, portraits, paintings, drawings
Posters, logos, events, advertisements, web banners
Shirts, album covers, fliers
Icons, wordpress designs, web layouts
Articles, stories, editing, resumes

Get in touch and we’ll work something out. I’m prompt, always receptive to your ideas and critique and very easy to communicate with. I’m up front about what I can do and how much things will cost.

Rawr and Best Wishes!
Sarah

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October 07, 2010

Jamborama Panormana

Dates are set for the next Cowtown Jamborama. I feel so special being involved. And look! New design! Four Lights Web Development maintains the make-it-work part of the Jamborama site, located at www.Jamborama.com.

Going up soon. :)