I love web design but it’s more like a hobby to me
Art · Devlog · Updates

I love web design but it’s more like a hobby to me

Tables

After the Death of Phillip Mk. V

It was time to switch gears and work on something else for a little while. Up until that point I’d managed to do a few revisions to some of the comic pages that are up as well as first draft pencils of the rest of the 1st chapter. With that in mind I decided to start working on the site again.

If you scroll through the blog archives you’ll probably come across my “devlog” that I was writing as I first started putting this site together. It’s not the most ground breaking or beautiful thing in the digital world, but I’m fairly content for now. I’ve wanted my own site since the olden days in middle school when everyone was off on the net making their own Angelfire and Geocities.

I was hooked from the moment I found Angelfire’s old html editor and learned

<html>
<head>
<title>Mage Punk Archives</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

I think I still have an old website from my high school web design class stashed away on a hard drive somewhere. I’ll revisit that in the future. But for now, let’s outline the changes I’ve made since the update that didn’t happen in November.

First, I reformatted the website a little.

  • Created new icons for the menubar
  • Reformatted the website.
    • Changed the site width. Made it a little more compact.
    • Removed the sidebar
    • Recent posts on the front page are now more compact in appearance.
    • Added a Gallery and a placeholder page for the Shop.
    • Revised the About section a little.
      • Might just move this info to the bottom of the front page and turn this space into a Profiles section.
    • Tidied up the Archives page a little.
  • Uploaded comic revision and wrote full posts for each one
    • Created new comic title cards (seen on the front page)
    • Added published dates to the comic page titles to account for reordering.

While the sidebar was useful for putting out a lot of static info at once, it made the front page a little too busy/cluttered. I like the simplicity of the no-column layout and the challenge of giving everything a fair chance at being seen. I still have to re-implement many of the widgets that were there into the current layout of the front page but I think that it can wait for now.

Then, I made the navbar illustrations.

The first time around, I made them too big and detailed for the size they’d be displayed at, so I used the default ComicPress navbar for a while instead. You’ll probably still see a few of these make their way into the pages of this site as little spot illustrations. It’d be a shame to let them just sit in the gallery.

Sometime before I started working on the site again, I started work on some little icon illustrations as a break from some beetle and flower studies that I was doing at the time. Before I knew it –(no, actually, it took about a week of work. I totally knew the whole time.) –before. I. knew. it. I’d made a whole set of illustrated graphics for the site.

Lesson learned I think.

Finally, it was time for comic revisions to go up.

I’d mentioned doing revisions on the pages I’d posted but I’d rather go into more detail about this in a separate post (The Big Update Part 3: End). For this post I only wanted to mention and show off the title cards that I made for the front page. Before the update, I made these smaller title card images that went in the side bar. They were fun to make, but I’m more attracted to the idea of using splash images on the front page.

Basically, there was a lot of image editing near the end

From the time I first dipped my toes into it in college, to the many years of putting it off or not having enough time at once, it has been an interesting ride tinkering around and learning to use WordPress. It currently feels like a Chimera-esque menagerie of plugins and self-taught CSS. I still have a lot to learn but I’m at a good enough stopping point for the time being. I’ve spent as much time as I could working on this site for the past two weeks (counting illustrations and image editing). It’s been an experience.

It’s time to start drawing again.

Unfortunately, I only ever have enough time for one project at any extended period of time. I’ll do my best to find a good balance between working on projects and posting here consistently. I still have a handful of small spot illustrations and banners that I want to draw for the site but nothing too numerous or complex. This coming Sunday, I want to try to post the 1st draft pencils for the rest of Chapter 1. I’ll also be writing one last post explaining what I have planned for Mage Punk and how I hope to present it on this site. I also have a ton of older art that I’ll be uploading in the coming weeks. After that blog posts should hopefully be a little more succinct than these have been.

I do love to ramble.

★★★