CreativeHerb.com

weeee Warhammerblogs.com launched. Lots of bug delays, lots of arguing over features VS launch dates, lots of scrambling to get everything coordinated. But it’s done, finally. Well, at least for version 1.

Of course, I already have Version 2 fully drafted in my head and hopefully one day soon, I will be able to get to it.

Why NewsGrid?

First of all, what you see now on the main page of WarhammerBlogs.com is called the NewsGrid. Why is it called that? Well, it’s news, and it’s lots of information placed in a grid format. NewsGrid. I wanted to create a place where the most important community information is displayed in a convenient manner. I went through a few versions before it got to what you see now. Kevin also made me remove a bunch of features that would have extended the production time by another 500%, but hey I’m the Creative. It’s my job and my right to think up totally unrealistic yet sometimes brilliant ideas.

The Colour Debate

For the NewsGrid colour scheme I used neutral shades of brown/tan at first, but that caused the headings to be lost in the clutter. So then I fixed it by vastly increasing the contrast of the overall colour scheme to punctuate every heading, also making it much easier to locate each section. That is also one of the reasons why I created icons for some of the headings, for the users to locate and differentiate easier.

The overall styling of the NewsGrid and User Blogs are fairly consistent, with the main theme graphic image up top, merged with the small nav bar. The theme layout is not at a point where I’m completely happy with it, but it will have to do for now. In a future version, I will make it even easier to design for. Because right now the design restrictions that I have imposed on myself is quite difficult sometimes.

Signup 1-2-3

The standard signup page from Wordpress MU (WPMU) was horrid at best, so I PSD designed a custom form, simplifying the process for the users visually. I guess sort of similar to having a “list” in blog posts. 1,2,3, easy as pie.

100+ Layers PSDs

Designing the theme headers was quite a challenge. I had to do it in a relatively short amount of time AND it had to look good. I think my current favourite one would be the Empire Theme, which I did last. I suppose I just adapted to theme designing over time.

I used a crazy amount of images sources and techniques for creating the theme headers. All images were taken from rights-free sources of course, but manipulated so much so that it is probably completely unrecognizable from the original.

To give an idea of the complexity, for example, I might split the Empire Theme into 8 different areas, with each area composed of 5 images, and each image would have their own 2-3 modification layers attached to it. Multiply that together and you have alot of layers for that one header alone.

I keep all my Adobe Photoshop PSD files extremely organized and labeled of course, with colour/levels as modification layers so that there’s no permanent ‘damage’ to the original image file, allowing me to make tweaks to it even months down the road.

Perhaps in future posts, if is any interest in my design process, perhaps I’ll share some of the design techniques that I’ve learned or discovered along the way. Till next time!