|Lesson 4| Headers

I want to paint like Rich Pellegrino. I am on a mission to find a template like his, I think he's using wordpress, it looks familiar. I like his header/logo. It is really appropriate for an illustrator. 

Joey Marsh is another illustrator with an amazingly clean and creative website, not to mention header. It is as if the girl in the header is painting the background as we are clicking around the site, very cool. 

Stuart McReath  is an amazing conceptual illustrator and again, I am choosing another very simple, basic header logo to display. I really like the idea of letting your work stand for itself. 

|Lesson 4-Fonts| & I love Unicorns

I downloaded a ton of free fonts from www.dafont.com today. Lots of fun stuff on there, and I promise I will donate to the designers when I am not a broke college student. ^_^

The exercise was to make a header for our blog with a new font in fireworks, and optimize it for the web. I settled on Unicorn NF, which I found on dafont.com. I love unicorns, they are my favorite animal ever! I used some filters to get my desired look: 

• I used 3 filters:
• Add Noise
• Raised Emboss
• Find Edges

I played around with blending modes, but liked my design the way it was. 

PNG; Bay Bridge at Night

So choosing the best image optimization for this plein air digital painting I did of the Bay Bridge about a week ago was like splitting hairs. The .png was 29kb, while the .jpg without sacrificing quality was about 32kb. Although the paintings are very similar, I think because this one has slightly less blending of hues is what gave .png the slight advantage in this case.

JPEG; Mom's Old Bear

I found the .jpg format to be the best for this still life painting of my Mom's old bear that I did on ArtRage for iPad. Honestly, the 4 up window and optimize options were acting a bit glitchy on my laptop; I couldn't adjust my screen mode to even see the information of the bottom 2 in the 4-up, and also I found that the information wasn't changing as I selected an image and changed the file. This is what I get for completing my homework in the last hour, Murphy's Law in action.

I was surprised that this was a smaller file size than what I think my png sizes were, given the glitchy-ness of it all. Hm, food for thought. Hopefully I will have better luck with fireworks on my desktop. I did enjoy the tutorial on creating a photo-realistic image box, I appreciated the attention to detail in getting the core and cast shadows and highlights in there, very nice.

-Amber

Lesson 3.2 (backwards) Image File Types

1. JPG
1. I'm Lovin' It, On a random search for .jpg examples I found this company's website that does promotional material for McDonald's Ireland. This is a 217kb .jpg file, often the best compression for gradients and rich photo-realistic images. I am guilty of visiting McDonald's in a hunger stricken fury last week on my way from Hayward campus to Foothill for class, why do I occasionally crave this stuff, I felt gross.
2. PNG
1. Web Designers vs Web Developers. I found this info graphic to be hilarious, and at 158kb, a png format is often the best compression for the in-between of photo realism and the super basic graphic. I mean seriously just look at the link, as a wanna-be web designer and a person who knows content developers, there is a stroke of truth and comedy to it 
3. GIF
1. POPA At Work This gif image is offered through wikipedia at only a small file size, 14kb. No higher resolution is offered in fear of copyright infringement. The bottom of the article explains. A basic 4 color image, without any graduating tones or perspective, is great for compressing to gif. 

My thoughts on color schemes in templates...

I have been asked to scour the web and find favorite blogs or templates utilizing the following color schemes:

• monochromatic
• analogous
• complementary
• saturated
• unsaturated

No small task, the inter-web is no small place, but I think I have found some that I really appreciate. 

1. Monochromatic:    wpzoom has a really strong, symmetrical, minimalist theme called photoland that I really appreciate; it is marketed toward the photographer or designer, and I agree as it has a showcase sort of feel. I like it as a portfolio option because it is no fluff, no funny business, let my work stand on it's own in a clean and elegant sort of way. If it were free and not $49 I would try it out.
2. Analogous: I really do have a thing for orange in design, I think it's a big thing right now. This analogous Drakon design is the perfect amount of texture in my opinion, without going overboard; plenty of white space and a neutral grey background to serve as a resting place. 
3. Complementary: call me a sucker for bookish templates I guess but this painted life template really appeals to me. The muted but still complementary color tone adds to the artist's painterly feel for me, and would be a great template for arts education, I feel. 
4. Saturated: Freshie Book  uses saturated colors in the small overall pattern of the background, which helps break up the harshness that can often occur when using a lot of saturated colors. 
5. Desaturated: Samanta by blogger styles has a beautiful desaturated palette in my opinion, with a sparsely used lime green for contrast and emphasis.

I still like my diary template better, but this has been an interesting exploration, bloggerstyles is a great resource for finding blogger templates.

Amber

Apologies for ever-changing layouts

Hm, I was sad to see my Diary template go, I saved it and will revert to it asap!

I chose and edited one of the simple template designs as instructed, and honestly am not a fan of the block coloring look to blogs or websites at all. It was educational playing with different color schemes and choices within the actual editor, though. Practice is essential.

I decided on an "accented analogic" color theme with the "less contrast" preset inside colorschemedesigner.com, a great resource that I will most likely use again. As my blog title is "cumquat" and I identify and like the idea of presenting myself as many of the orange color-qualities; exciting, creatve, fresh, but not as "corporate" as red, I chose a secondary color scheme with a base of orange and a compliment of turquoise. I used tints to tone down the background body, title background, and a shade of the turquoise for the header background as well as the visited links color.

My colors are warm, save for the cool blue-green of the post title background color, maybe I need more cool in there, I was going for warm, but this could be too warm. Repetition is created by the use of cool title background colors and constant warm tones elsewhere, this blue amongst the sea of oranges and red also creates contrast.