Blambo Art Website: Graphics

Home	Wireframes	Graphics	Icons	Typography	D. Media	Final

Why aren't there many graphics?

Graphics are not entirely meaningful to this website since the emphasis is to not distract from the more prominent visual elements, i.e. Ray's art and the dynamic CSS animations.

So what graphics are there?

The one strong element on the site that has a lot of identity is the logo which is persistently placed in the center top of the site. Many users are already accustomed to using the logo as an effective "home" button for returning them to the unaltered state of the site [Source]. This has been taken into consideration with the only graphic present on the website that is not an icon.

Let's see that logo then

While looking through Ray's old work I found the following old logo design:

While certainly not a bad logo it does not lend well to the styling of the rest of the site and while it would be ok against a white background it would probably be preferred with a transparent background. I was able to do just that with Gimp.

With this improved file for my logo I then used color selection tools in Gimp to change the solid colors to better match the two main colors of the site's design, #FFCC99 and #FFA25A. I did however need to use two more colors that were sequentially deeper shades of #FFA25A as it was the darker tone. Using Adobe's Kuler wheel I selected #BF7943 and #7F512D as my tones.
Working Logo

Is this the final logo?

The logo above may not ultimately be the one that is deployed at final release. This is effectively a placeholder logo that succeeds in very directly expressing what the brand is. The logo is in a minimalist styling that along with its new color scheme matches both tonally and thematically with the rest of the site. There may very likely come an animated version of a logo that is not similar to what is shown above after further consultation with Ray.

Any developments?

After some work I redesigned the logo to more strongly match with the website and just overall look cleaner and less grainy. Following is the design process the new and final logo went through. This time around I started entirely from scratch keeping in mind the four tones I had selected from my previous design. I wanted to emphasize the idea of black being the base color and that selection created an orange highlight. This ultimately could not create many satisfactory logos and seemed more distracting than anything else. In the end I chose to make a faux gradient over the text that would imply either motion or dimension. In the context of the page, it is meant to signal moving elements but also is very pleasing to the eye as it looks like a sunset.

What's up with some of the pictures?

The inquisitive viewer may have noticed that a lot of the art on the site is rather compressed and isn't really indicative of the kind of releases that a digital artist can output. The reason for this is that the hosting server for this site would probably not appreciate being inundated with 100MB of high resolution pictures, the actual high resolutions will be included in the final release of the site which will be hosted on a server that does not have these limitations. Another thing you may have noted is that when you open the lightbox of some of the sprites the image can seem rather small in a large browser window. This is due to the lighboxes being instructed to not blow out the images and to display the true resolution of the image, which for a sprite can be rather small.