CGOT > About

About the Crystal Guild of Twilight

The Crystal Guild of Twilight is the name of the order that rises from the chaos of the darkness at the end of the storyline we were supposed to create for this site. Unfortunately, life and other things interfered with our ability to actually get any work done on the storyline, and work on it has since been postponed indefinitely. The website now serves as a shrine to the creative minds of the day to day people we have met throughout life, featuring the brilliance (and lack thereof) of said authors' quotes, artwork, and other writings. CGOT also continues to be an mp3 request site, dedicated to the spread of musical excellence. Work on this site began in June 2002.

About the Current Layout

Nearly all of my designs are created from scratch, this layout being no exception. When I first sketched the concept out on paper I wanted to convey the idea of flowing streams/ribbons overlapping and balanced in positive and negative space. In this layout I was trying for a more simple, uncluttered, and elegant design, so I tried to keep the colors to a minimum to be less distracting to the eyes.

Some new techniques were applied in the making of this layout. Adobe Illustrator was used extensively to manage the exact curvatures of the streams, and carried the added benefit of being vector based, meaning that I could scale the design to any percentage and it would still be perfectly sharp. The use of vector graphics in this design is what allows for as clear a definition between colors and lines as is seen in the banner, along with the curved text. The overlapping, glassy effects were created to mirror those to be released in Windows Vista and bring more interesting features to the overlaps, although they don't show up as vividly against black as they do against an actual picture. Gradients were applied to help the streams fade out to black, and a pinch of sparkle thrown onto the right side for extra effect.

Lastly the CGOT logo was redone, using Maya (instead of Bryce 5) to render a better looking red orb with stars. The rest of the design was done in Adobe Illustrator and enhanced in Photoshop using the outer glow and bevel/emboss effects to give it a more 3d appearance. I think the colors and 3d ended up coming out much more nicely than in Version 2, although to be fair Version 2 was limited to 256 colors because I had to save it as a .gif in order to gain the transparencies present in the 2nd layout, which allowed me to stretch my html code and break out of the traditional rectangle to play with the concept of the navigation bar overhang.

This layout was also enhanced by the introduction of CSS and the much more extensive use of divs, which help me maintain standards and changes much more easily than individually updating pages like I used to have to. In addition, it allows me push the boundaries of design like the funky extension of one the streams into the content section without causing an interference, compromising the html code, or forcing me to use a suboptimal image format. Unlike in Version 2, the only appearance of i-frames in this layout occurs in the writings section, where I tried to make it more user friendly by displaying the content (when possible) in the same page with all the links, rather than opening another page or using an ugly regular frame.

Scrapbook

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