Concepts continued

Hello hello !

So today I've scanned in the concepts for the remaining pages, which I did over the week-end ... let's have a look !

1st off there's the final Art page :

So there's that Art Gallery theme going on there with the classical frame and all.
It's a bit obvious but I came up with nothing better so it's probably just gonna stick :-D
There'll be cool details here & there thou, like the fact that there's a frame within the frame (the outer frame and the intro/info picture inner frame), that I'll integrate the page buttons inside of the inner frame and, most amazingly, I'm also planning on having some kind of "jungle up" button that changes the whole interface of the page.

Jungle = off > Rather straightforward gallery with an intro picture at the top.
Jungle = on > The outer frame shrink to fit closely around the inner frame, thus deleting the gallery, but characters from the gallery appear on the intro picture and become the new way to access the individual pictures from the gallery (just interact with them > click).

I'm actually rather excited about this one :-D
There's still quite a couple of things I have to figure out still, such as how to work out that gallery thing, but if I get it right I believe it could be a really classy & cool page :-)

Then there's the Design page :

That might get a bit tricky 'cause there's so much content to go in there (i.e.: the list at the top of the page) ...
It shall be an extra challenge.
In the meantime, in terms of layout, I'm just gonna use a clever trick : the ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE :-D ! That's damn right, I'm planning on using an InDesign CS3 mockup for the layout ... why not ?
I'll make it all my own (including changing the toolbars into link button panels) and I think it could look really good, + for the medium (the joke works exactly on the same level that the frame one does for the Art page ... clever, huh :-P).
It opens up possibilities also, like if I get crazy with my scripts I might add options to reorganize each main panel (a main panel = 1 module, e.g.: Flash/After Effects/etc.), like from oldest to newest chronologically or inverse, or to close separate panels. But I'm not there yet.
That's more like if I get bored and that. We'll see :-)

Also NEWS FLASH, Articles/Blog shall directly redirect to this blog, so I won't have to design any actual page for it ... we're down to 7, 3 left :-)

Then there's the Info page :

I think that one's pretty important 'cause it made me realize that, at the end of the day, only 4 of my pages needed to have a really individual personality :

-My Main page, 'cause it's the 1st thing you see and thus requires to be kick-ass @ 1st glance, it's rather straightforward
-My Music page, that shows my musical creations
-My Art page, that shows my paintings & stuff
-My Design page, that shows what I've been up to since last year up until now.

The other 3 (Info, Links & Sitemap) don't need to be that impressive, they don't need to show my creativity as much at the above 4 that directly present it.
They're rather information/text-oriented and should be more functional & less playful.
I've been admiring the GreasyMoose since I discovered Space Duck on Youtube and I also really like Cyriak, whom a friend introduced me to earlier this school year (not the dude himself, his stuff ... I wish thou !), they're 2 very important influences on me and when you look at them, their about/contact pages are nothing too fancy (the GreasyMoose @ about - Cyriak @ about - Cyriak @ contact), so I'll just follow their footsteps on this one for now if it's OK.

Anyways so then there's that rounded edge average page standard, the buttons at the top left, my smoking DJ on the left (just like on the main page, just slightly edited in the way you interact with him), lots of blabla about me and how cool I think I am, the page link buttons at the bottom on the left with explanations of what you should expect to find on each page, and finally my e-mail at the bottom right (thou I might put the other 1 there ... I'll see).
That's for the page, that should about cover it really, not so much more to put in there ... it should do the job pretty well, thou 2nd thought I might delete the links at the top ... I'll see.

On the picture you may have noticed that I came up with a wicked cool concept for the loading bar also, that utilizes the ball concept that pages shall evolve from and turn back into, awesome !
There's not much to it, blank screen, circle draws itself, bar appears in the middle of empty circle, 0% > 100% ~ the circle fills itself into a solid ball, the bar disappears leaving a full solid ball on screen.
And then it goes on to animate into the main page.
It should be good ! I'm looking forward to that :-) ...

And last but not least, we have the Links & Sitemap pages :

So these I also use a much more simple straightforward design.
There's not much to say about the Links page, I'll wanna have a rather long list, I got 13 Links in there 4 sure already, so I'll have to take that into consideration.
It's very much inspired by the GreasyMoose's links page.

And then out of all my pages the Sitemap page is the blandest, I think ...
But then also the simplest ... I hope ?
I'm planning on having some kind of domain map going on as well showing what's on peterwhyts.com (so Uni servers for now), what more or less belongs to me elsewhere (e.g.: blogs & that) & what's on the rest of the internet I link to, something that would look similar to what Ishkur did in his brilliant Guide to Electronic music.
That & a bit of MouseOver coding to display extra info & that should be pretty much it for the Sitemap.



So that's it for the concept !
Next up : 1st mockup ... let's do this !

In other news I decided to slightly change the icon system because 1- I wanted short & snappy words for each of them (e.g.: "Sitemap" becomes just "Map") & 2- I realized that the icon to Links (now "Giants", by the by) looked like the overall layout on Map ... confusing as hell ! So Giants & Map get a new icon.
You'll see !

Anyways that's way enough blabla for today, I'm a go and save the rest for later.
Ciao !

Starting concepts

Hey there !
Today we're going over the starting concepts for my website layout !

It all started with that layout :

I drew this before the module started 'cause I bought the domain on which I'm gonna host my site last summer, it's the very core concept we're starting from.
"Simple", "bright", "colourful", "easy-to-access" and "cool no trespassing lines-type bands" spring to mind.
That hard-to-read thing written in pencil at the bottom left is a scribble of the evolution system used in the game Patapon 2. One of the concept I want to base my website on is that of an archive, that would let you view every version of the website that ever got put online at any time, and I wanna have a system of buttons organized like a tree much like that system. The buttons would toggle older versions of the flash interface displayed. More on this in the next image.

I then developed it into that baby :

Same basic concept and layout but I started thinking about what pages it should actually link to, the content of my website-to-be, how many buttons I should have on the right side, etc.
This is the final concept for the homepage as of yet, but it also made me realize that now, I have another 7 pages to design, as I want to give each one a personal identity, which would conform to the same homebrew overall style, linking them all together.
Notice the button system I mentioned at the bottom. Andrew advised to get into XML on this one, I'm rather dreading this part to be honest but I ordered a book on that so we shall see ...

So there's final concept as of yet for the 2nd page, the Music page :

I somehow came up with that cool hexagonal concept thing, got now idea how to be honest, but I wanna stick with it ! All pages are going to be organized loosely around a round centrepiece that I want to use in the fold-in and fold-out animations of each page. As I want to host each page as a separate flash application on a separate web adress within a separate HTML sheet thingy, it's important that they all have the same starting point and finishing point in their animation to facilitate linking them together, so the idea so far is to make them come out of a little sphere and fold back into it as well. It'll make a lot more sense once I got a working 1st mockup of that whole thing, which shall be the 1st thing I get down to once I got my final 8 page concepts.

Another thing that came out of all that is that I'm gonna need icons for each page, so there's more development on the said icons & the coming 3rd final concept as of yet-to-be, for the Art page :

So I got to a point where I'm comfortable with what precisely is gonna be on each icon, now it's all a matter of actually making them ...
And I'm planning on using signs and symbols I developed last term in our Beyond Desktop Publishing module on InDesign. I got a whole family of little pieces of squares, rectangles and circles that work within a square grid and I'm gonna use those to create neat simple icons that I shall then get onto flash through Illustrator.

It's all planned !
Now it's all a matter of actually getting down to it ...

More soon, hopefully I'll have a mockup by then.

Bie for now !

HOLY FLYING SHIT I DID IT !!!

Why hellow people !
It's a bit of an informal greeting, but U'll get used 2 it if U're new 2 my style ...

So basically this is my 2nd blog, this is my 1st blog.
This post is mainly about this blog's layout, which I just spent HOURS fine tuning so it looks GOOD !
And CSS is a bitch ... but not that much 'cause it's working in the end so I'm content :-)
Oh and U should know that this blog is about the making of this website, hence the link at the top.

OK so basically what I did for the layout, as using a pre-created layout is out of the question, is work it out from my 1st blog (which looked like this when I started messing around with the code) so this blog's 1st layout was that ... not so groovy, I agree there.
So I went to dig out an old background I created myself a long time ago, stuck it on here, then messed around with CSS for a couple of hours, came up with a cool header picture, and BAMS, here it is ! IDK, I like it ... it's not all perfect yet, there's a couple of things that could be made better, like the comments section, but I'll start worrying about that when I get coments ... if I ever do.

Now why "Peter Whyts", you ask ? Well Peter Whyts (which derives from my middle name, Pierre, which gives you "Peter" in English and "Whyts" which derives "DJ YTS", an even older alias, which itself derived from "Yann the Stranger) is my old artist name from the times long ago (like, Middle~High School) when I used to make music on Fruity Loops ... that's damn right, Fruity Loops !!! But more like FL 3.4, FL 4 & up to FL 5 or so, not the latest versions ... obviously if it was a while back !
For the ones interested I still have 2 tracks from that era online on this old (German lol) website ... I did quite a couple of graphics that I'd use for my tracks too, there's one of them where you can see my symbol clearly ...
I'd work all that stuff out on MSPaint & sometimes even Word back then, I'll have to revamp my old symbol on InDesign, but now not, later on during this module.

Anyways so I worked out this old background from one of FL 3.4's default background !
The default looks like this (that's stolen straight from the software's system files lol).
Then I came along and MSPainted stuff onto it (this is how you do it kids lol). I used various assets in there, but one of them was an MSN icon I had created from the MyOwnMusic website's banner ... undortunately I could not fine the original icon back.
And Ta-Da ! There's ye background ! With my signature on it ... neat !

Last thing, I spent MORE ages messing around with the title pic so it could reditect to the website ... but I did it in the end. And I also added a neat pic that redirects to the other blog so ... YAY :-D !

So what you see here is what I came up for, as a general layout for this blog.
Like I said there's a couplf of things here & there that I'm not too happy with but all in all it should remain among those lines.

So, enjoy the posts, ciao !