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 !