The sandbox is pretty easy to work with. I haven’t checked it in IE6, but things seem to be going smoothly. I decided a “cloud” motif. The truth is, I am not much of a graphic designer. I know what looks good, but I can’t produce my own stuff very easily. Clouds allow me to be fuzzy around the edges.
Some things in my head were:
- Animated
- Friendly
- Rounded Corners
- Transparency
- 3D Layered
- Original
Yes, this list is a jumble of different topic areas, but still, those were in my head.
I started with jQuery and jQuery UI. I added the background images and colors and made the clouds. Animating them was super easy. I rounded the corners with a jQuery plugin. It is easy to use and doesn’t make a million sub-<DIV> tags. However, it’s not perfect when the fade gets behind it. You can see the color mismatch. I will have to figure something else out. I could change the structure of each box to be a 3×3 table grid. That would allow me to use transparent PNG-24 files to create the rounded effect. In fact, that would allow me to put an outerglow on the whole thing too. I am leaning towards doing this. It would enhance the 3D effect and the table structure is not that ugly. I wish there was a better way.
I actually tried corner.js. I used a small 50×50 PNG with 50% transparency and absolutely positioned it around the DIV with a height/width of 100%. It worked PERFECTLY, except that is was dog-slow. I removed it for two reasons. One, it wasn’t jQuery and it felt wrong. Two, it was just too slow. Still, this was the closest thing I had to a superDIV ever.
I added a couple of new plugins like the rich text editor for comments.
Right now, I think I am just in brainstorming mode. I am trying out new things and the design is coming into focus. I need to add in the picture of the kids somewhere. Maybe riding on the clouds?
When I look at the theme, I like it, but I don’t know if it’s ME. Is this the blog of a UX Architect? Somehow I don’t think it is. Is this original enough? Does it evoke the right feeling? I tend to think No, it doesn’t. Still, it’s alot of fun to play around with it. I like the feeling of playing with one’s one blog.
Whatya think?