dW

My Designs Are Up!

Edit: The designs have gone over really well. I’ve received a lot of PMs and have read a lot of messages here and on the My Opera front page thanking me for doing those designs. I really appreciate all the thanks, guys.

I’m really happy to see that two of my three designs are up. I finished them last week, and it was a several month collaboration between Fred and I. I still work for a living so I worked on these off and on for a couple of months.

I was contacted by Fred in March asking if I would be interested. Of course I was, so I sent a speedy, excitedly “yes” reply. About a month later I received an email from Fred with templates he was using for the new My Opera site along with what I was allowed to do and not to do. The rules I had to abide by amounted to this:

1. The structure has to remain the same as it is for the existing designs. This meant that my CSS had to be applied after Fred’s structure.css file.
2. Structure could be altered slightly to make images and design elements fit better.
3. I was able to change images and colors around however I liked.

That’s about it, really. I was essentially given free reign, some templates, and an okay to go nuts. What I did initially was create the designs in Photoshop, one by one. I would almost completely mock up the design in Photoshop for Fred to see. He’d approve the design, and I would move on to the next one. I didn’t have the templates where I could just jump in and do a design in my head without a full mockup, so it took some time to do all three designs in Photoshop, especially when it’s not very good at typography. It took about a month to do the three design mockups, and then about another month to code them. I’ll go through each design, one by one.

Early Bird

This one really started with my friend, Jeff, wanted a proper blog design for his My Opera blog. He prefers really simple layouts with focus mostly on the content rather than the layout itself. He’s not much for flashy graphics. He just wants his stuff read. Right about the time we were talking about one I got the email from Fred containing the templates and the go aheead to start on my designs. I just decided that the first design would be one that Jeff would enjoy.

The design does contain some images obviously, but nothing is in the design that takes the focus away from the content itself. There’s no special effects or anything like that. The photograph is a photograph I took myself (and I will soon put it in my photo library) of hummingbirds feeding from the feeder on my porch. The photograph supplied all of the colors for the entire design. Pretty much the entire focus of this one was to keep it simple. I think it does that. Fred named it, and I think it’s an excellent name for it.

Garden of Dreams

This one is the opposite of the previous one. When I got to this design initially I had no idea what I was going to do. One day I just sat around looking at other websites when I noticed there were some sites out there rewarding people with large displays where the bigger the screen you have the more you see of some picture or design in the background. I really liked that concept and I ran with it.

The design obviously involves flowers. I originally had an idea for a floral design to save for later (if I got to do more). I couldn’t think of anything else, so I merged two ideas I had into one. I don’t think it’s as nice or as elegant as the first one, but I think it works out fine. The photographs are taken by me of my mother’s flower garden. She has an excellent green thumb, and her flowers always make great pictures. I will be putting the set I took for this design up shortly, too.

In addition to the treat people with higher resolutions get on this design people with the typeface Zapfino will see it used in this design. If they’re using Opera they’ll get an even bigger treat and see Opera use ligatures and such with the typeface. No other browser does that but Opera. I was surprised to see Opera do that. Illustrator is the only program I’ve seen period on the Macintosh that can take advantage of the ligatures and alternate glyphs in the typeface; now I can add Opera to that list. Macintosh users will typically have this font already installed on their computers by default.

Oh and the title of this one was named by Jeff. It’s from Noriyuki Iwadare’s Grandia II Soundtrack. He was listening to that song as I asked his opinion on what it should be named. Odd how stuff like that happens.

As I mentioned there’s a third one. It ran into some problems with a copyright dispute. Fred and I didn’t know that there was a dispute. I’m just having to change some things up; after that the My Opera guys will make it available. In the middle of all this I am fixing my design. I don’t know when I’ll have it done as I’m doing it in my free time which is sort of limited these days. Anyway, I thought I’d let you guys know what went on with these designs.