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Not too long ago, I got vaporlocked into the new site redesign coming out in 2010. Lost track of time, next thing I know it's 8PM. But since the website design is actually done, I figured I'd give you all a sneak preview of the site design, and give you a little rundown of what my site looked like over the years. Clicking on the images will get you a full sized screen shot of the old sites.
There was a running theme for a long time (and still kinda is a running theme) about having Chun Li on my homepage, and an animated gif of her was on the top left of the page. I'd designed the site in a kind of Highway Sign motif, Highway Gothic font on Green. The icons streaming down on the left were the beginnings of the "Click-O-Rama," a list of links I used to relieve boredom at work. If you look at the top left icon, you'll see a link to an upcoming comic called Closetspace. :) The page had a hand drawn image of a Victrola, the words "Coming Soon" and an illegal RealAudio file of Suzanne Vega's "As Girls Go." Obligatory webring down there, too. At the very bottom you'll find my old Monster Sig, which I used on Usenet when someone said Girl Fighters sucked.
In late 2001, I was laid off and spent the time between looking for work by doodling comics. After a brainstorm I sat down and began work on A Wish for Wings, which ran over Keenspace/Comicgenesis for a good number of years. I rather like this design (the background was all watermarked, so it really didn't cut off like this image shows), which I called Dolari Special Dark, after the chocolate. :) I do have what looks like a prototype Closetspace page in that same theme, but never got much beyond a purple gradient background, it seems.
Eagle eyed viewers might notice that AWFW says "by Jenni Bravo, written by Jenn Dolari." At the time, Jenni had offered to continue AWFW for me when my computer died in late 2001. While we never did start the joint venture, I pushed it for a while. It's also the first to break my page into themes. If you clicked on the Click-O-rama, the theme stayed blue with Chun Li, but clicking on the second set of links, the theme changed to purple with a picture of Shuriken (10 grotzits says you have no idea who she is, and 20 that you don't' know what a grotzit is), and the third page was red with a pic of Supergirl. Having specific colors per section is something that's carried over to this day with the pages (Closetspace in purple, AWFW in gold, Wishworld in silver and everything else is in red).
Frankly, I don't know what I was thinking with the interlaced lines. The red was particularly eye hurting, and after a week or two, I dimmed it down a bit. The interlacing was also used in AWFW and CS (CS premiered with this design), which didn't hurt near as many eyes, but, my god, was still tacky as all get out. You'll notice I'd moved on from Chun Li, replacing her with Nakoruru from Samurai Shodown. The icons from the old 1998 site were brought back, but my GOD the 16-colors-per-icon thing looked horrible.
The front page was ground down to the bare essentials, taking you to the comics or the Click-O-Rama. Most everything else was simply pared down to nothing, since the only thing that mattered at the time were the rapidly-gaining-popularity comics. I'd even stopped updating the Click-O-Rama at the time. I really should update that thing more. I'd always liked a lot of the menu designs you saw in the Final Fantasy Movie and in things like the original XBox dashboard. I attempted to emulate it in the main page.
If you look carefully, you'll notice, the Click-O-Rama icon is gone. It's tough to compilate and keep current, and running two comics a week was kinda nervewracking It came back after a few years in 2006.
Real quick, the color themes are still all Chun-Li based. Chun-Li's blue qipao will be used for an upcoming story called Manpower, red is for the Click-O-Rama, Grey for Wishworld, Yellow/Gold for AWFW, Green for the upcoming Book of Xand, Purple for Closetspace. White and Mint Green haven't been used yet (maybe for the SFJenn game) when I get around to making those pages. An IFrame was added instead of a comic, for easy scrolling without needing to scroll the whole page. After some folks complained that they didn't like reading white text on black screens, I added a "Reverse colors" link to flip the page colors. Seriously, though, black on white hurts my eyes...but if y'all wannit. The sites haven't changed much in five years, so I felt it was time for a site-wide-redesign. That and the "Your site is so retro!" comments. So what does the far off future of 2010 hold? Where do we go from here? 2023? Coming soon... |
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Material, HTML and text contained on pages originating from DOLARI.NET and DOLARI.ORG are written by Jenn Dolari. Copyright 1992-2023 Jennifer Dolari. All Rights Reserved. All other materials are copyright by their respective owners. |