Craig Campbell @ 4:56 pm
CraigSoup.com has undergone another mild redesign. I’ve brought it together to make it a little more visually cohesive, and I really like the results. As you can see, I haven’t redesigned the blog just yet, but that shouldn’t be long in coming.
I got the fancy, dark blue background above the header from the ‘Patterns’ section of Brusheezy.com. Thanks to Shawn Rubel for the awesome design!
The new design was created with XHTML and CSS, and the graphics were created in Photoshop.
Anyways, please leave a comment, and let me know what you think of the new web design.
Update: The design, as you can clearly see, has now been applied to the blog. Ah, the beauty of uniformity!
Craig Campbell @ 4:30 pm
As you can tell from my portfolio, WriterInside.com has undergone several face lifts over the past couple of years. But I think I’ve finally hit the jackpot with the current header design.
The previous design, although it was vibrant and had a little of that Web 2.0 flare to it, didn’t exactly fit the mood of what I was trying to go for with the site. So I decided to do an overhaul, something that would ring true to the intended audience of the website, and I feel like I captured that with this header.
I created the paper background of the header by scanning a sheet of paper that I tore out of a very organic-looking journal that I had. The paper’s practically impossible to write on with a pen, but the texture is really cool. Anyways, once I scanned the paper in, I touched it up using Photoshop’s Burn tool. This gave the edges of the paper background the darkened, almost scorched look to it.
The rest was pretty easy. I just pulled in a couple of images that fit the mood I was going for, overlaid some spiral shapes to give the header a sense of depth and then masked out a partial sun shape from the upper-left corner.
All in all, I really think this new header was a success! What do you think?
Craig Campbell @ 10:01 am
From time to time, I thought it would be cool to show off a particular piece of work from my portfolio and talk about how it was done.
My first show-off piece was actually just an experiment — a little bit of tomfoolery, if you will. A few years ago, I decided, against my better judgment, to see if I could create a photorealistic graphic of a guitar in Photoshop. I say “against my better judgment” because I knew that it wouldn’t be a quick project that I could just throw together.
Sure enough, after many hours of hardcore Photoshopping, I created the image to the right.
Once I finished, I showed it off to several of my friends, and I knew it was a success when they just shrugged it off with a half-hearted “that’s nice.” This meant that they thought it was just an unimpressive photograph of a guitar. Once I explained to them that it wasn’t a photograph, but rather a work of sheer genius and unadulterated talent, they were genuinely impressed . . . as well they should have been.
And now, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think.
