Thursday, December 10, 2009

Blog Skin Customization

So, I found a bit of free time, and quickly knocked out some projects that have been sitting on the back burner for a while. First, earlier this week, I pounced on the Vortex guild forums skin; we'd been using an uncustomized skin for far too long, and my fellow officer and web admin decided to force my hand by "selecting" a new skin and setting me loose on it.

His exact quote was, "I just changed the default skin on the forums. I'll wait patiently for your head to explode!" I love my guild :)

The past 5 months of learning to customize skins in Drupal (where I'm coordinating 6+ individual css files into a single website skin) paid off in that I felt perfectly at home digging through PhP and CSS and telling it what to look like. I had some fun with it, too... and all my guildies got to watch as my designer-developer humor took over and put various placeholder images around the site pointing out problems and sizes and notes and random doodles. Per the GM's orders, I had to leave one of them up:



Personalized guild forums? I think so. They have my name on them!

For those not viewing my blog through a reader feed, I'm sure you can see the development of my next project: customizing my blog skin :) I'd been using the Scribe template that comes packaged with the Blogger tools, simply slapping in a background screenshot that I liked (Nagrand is pretty!), and customizing here and there to give the sidebar and post titles some way to stand out, but for a long time I've reaaaaaally wanted to make it my own.

So I have. Comparison screenshots:













I still have some things to tweak, obviously, but I'm quite happy with the results thus far. Plus, the background doesn't look weird when stretched to 1600px wide resolution or higher :)

8 comments:

lissanna said...

Your new blog background looks dreamy!

Kae said...

I considered going with a green hue for the whole "Emerald Dream" thing... but I like blue better :)

Anonymous said...

ooo coolness! really nice!

lissanna said...

I like the blue better than I think green would look for your site.

Charles said...

I really like the new blue. It does feel a bit sort of cold and wintry, which might get a bit tiring when we start to get sick of winter - even the background looks like snow. But it's also cleaner and easier on the eyes than the previous green.

Though I also wonder if the grey title bars are a little gloomy?

Do druids do seasons and stuff? I'm fairly sure they were important to the Celtic druids... Maybe you could try a bright yellowy version come spring!

Charles said...

Though, heh, after posting that comment I went to my own blog and found the dominant colours are blue and orange... so I guess I'm a little biased :D

Kae said...

The title header and menu bar are leftovers from the previous skin, customizations I did that looked a lot more blue against the yellow parchment :) I plan to redo them, but will have to wait til next week!

Anonymous said...

I like it! =)