So I if you looked at my website within the last few hours or so you might have seen a very different theme. It was a grunge like style. My goal was to try and use PNGs for different layering and styles. Evenually I wanted the background to dynamically change depending on a post’s categories and tags. However, I ran into some obvious drawbacks.
Here is a screenshot of the design:
It was a refreshing change to play around with from my previous web design work. However, I soon found my pages approaching 2-4 MB in size due too the large PNG files used to gain the transparent look. The problem is basically that a image with large dimensions is going to be a great deal larger than a GIF or JPEG. Of course you get the great alpha transparencies with PNGs, but to be sligly glutonous with dimensions can be extremely costly in file size.
I didn’t finish the layout, just the general parts, when I realized I had designed it all wrong. When I sliced up my images, I should have designed and planned to use jpegs or gifs for 99% of the design. That way I could just use PNGs for the very few times it was absolutely necessary. Seeing how I didn’t want to keep this design permanately I decided not to go back and fix it. I just reverted to my old theme.
If anyone is interested in how I did some of the styles, I’ve zipped up the PSD and Theme files for download. Feel free to use them as you see fit. I also relyed on this article for textures, fonts, photoshop brushes, etc. to use on this design.
Files
Related Posts
- WordPress Carrington Theme - I’m Impessed I just read over at Matt Mullenweg’s blog about the annoucement of the Carrington Theme for WordPress. For those who don’t know, WordPress is a PHP/MySQL based blogging system and is the one I use for my blog. I’ve installed the Carrigton Theme and I really like it. Over the...
- 100th Blog Entry - First Year of Real Blogging This is my 100th entry into my blog, and 25 days before my first year mark for writing on my blog. It’s been a great experience, and I’m starting to see some real traffic. I’ve found that publishing meaningful content, whether a simple bug fix, or a full blown tutorial,...
- Redesigning blog…. Alright, I figure it is about time I design my own WordPress theme. Most likely in the next few months I’m going to need to design some WordPress themes. Hopefully I’ll get able to do a good job…. Bookmark ThisSubscribeBloglinesBlogmarksDiggdel.icio.usFacebookFurlNewsVineRedditStumbleUponTechnorati...
- Carrington Theme & Hashcash Plug-in Solution I’ve been a huge Hashcash fan since using WordPress. In a nutshell, it requires a browser to process some javascript to generate a number to verify that the browser in-fact read the page. This helps prevent bots from submitting spam comments. The idea is that if a spam bot was...
- Is Apple Blinded by Style? I have to add my voice to Jason D. O’Grady from ZDNet’s “The Apple Core” about the new MacBook & MacBook Pro. Jason complains: The thing that bums me out the most about yesterday’s MacBook announcements is Apple’s move to all-glossy displays. I’ll make no bones about it – I...
Recent Comments