The New Look

I've finally completed the new look for the blog, and I think I just might owe myself a pat on the back. Maybe even a tall cold one. But of course, I couldn't have done it without the help of numerous people on the internet, writing graphics design and xhtml tutorials out of the goodness of their own hearts, and others posting up Creative-Commons licensed artwork for me to borrow. And one guy who drew birds a couple centuries ago, but whose work has, alas, slipped into the public domain.

So, without further ado, here's the acknowledgments.

For the header graphics:

I decided the header graphic ought to feature the eponymous birds, but I wanted something a bit older than stills from, say, Marty Stouffer's Wild America. I was thinking maybe something by Audubon, but when searching my favorite internet repository of old-fashioned imagery, BibliOdyssey, I came upon the work of Francois Nicolas Martinet. Plate 127 from his "Ornithologie" is the wood sparrow seen at left above, and plate 26 features a Chinese goldfinch, seen in the background at right.

For the typeface, I was thinking of something from a Victorian-era book's title page. The images are combined with a freeware typeface, Oklahoma, by Harold Lohner. This typeface was manipulated in Adobe Illustrator to create the wave-like effect, as well as the linear gradient using the tuturial from GoMediaZine. I added a parchment texture layer, available here from Flicker User DevonTT, over the paper of the book. The book itself is a "Robin Hood and His Adventures," a retelling from 1903 by Paul Cheswick that one of my grandparents had and has been passed down, along with a bunch of other old books. I photographed it and cloned out the text in Photoshop, which I also used to make the seamless paper background for the body of the blog. Originally, I wanted to the bottom edge of the book at the bottom of the blog, but I don't believe it is possible to dynamically force the background to tile a rounded integer number of times, so I can't add the bottom of the book seamlessly. (In other words, you'd see a weird line in between the background of the blog body and the bottom of the book image, and it would look awkward. Sorry.)

For the wooden background, I wanted to create something that looked like an old table, so I used a photograph of the wooden floor from my apartment, shifted some planks around so it would tile seamlessly, and adjusted the color so it would be just so.

The epigraph is from Ezekiel. I will be writing more on the content later, hopefully. The typeface is Ohlo de Boi, by Billy Argel, who was inspired by "the first Brazilian postage stamp."

Coding assistance was largely from the tutorials by Small Potato at wpdesigner.com. Other coding help for the CSS design was from Dan Cederholm and these guys. Image caption help from Bryan Harris, and pull quote help from Chris Pearson.

The typeface for the blog test is Constantia, chosen because it is an old-fashioned serif font with hanging numerals.

That's about it.

Oh, and thanks to my roommate John who was going to help me transfer my site to WordPress, until I decided to just renovate it on BlogSpot instead.