Happy New Year’s. It’s a celebration, bitches.

One of the great things about consistently keeping personal document backups is finding web design projects of yesteryear. Even now my illustration skills are absolutely brutal so I rely on other’s peoples hard work instead (see: this site’s layout). However, imagine me with a few less years experience. Now that we have that in mind, let’s continue with examples.

• SacrificeDM circa 1999 [846 KB]
  Go green. The logo represented my then fascination with the text rendering app Xara3D. Note my mad pixel-art skills for the grey borders without any anti-aliasing whatsoever. When keeping it real goes wrong, no? Instead of <hr> I use a dotted line again made with Xara3D along with a sidebar of lame facts and standard “fuck you for not having the proper browser” message. I like how the bottom right of the page is completely empty leaving the last few map boxes misaligned with the screen. The colour scheme makes me dry heave.
• SacrificeDM circa 2000 [421 KB]
  This is where I enter an Ola Björling phase by going back to the bare basics of a black background with plaintext and an image. The big text at the top of the page also known as a “logo” is somewhat bearable in this redesign. Bonus marks for the pixelated, pseudo-beveled screenshots. Hey, at least you don’t have to press ctrl+a to read the content.
• Doomworld circa 2000 [526 KB]
  Ah, the famous display of unreadable text and a visibly jarring juxtaposing of objects. What the fuck is with that top menu? Srsly. I’m quite sure that I did all the shadowing pixel by pixel in Paint Shop Pro and I’m glad to see my work bring on the comedy. Note the pushed in “News” button that seems to be pushed into an aqua surface, yet the background is gray. The geometrically fucked curves and discovery of PSP’s noise filter completes the disgusting visage. The only good thing I can pull out of this is the logo’s font which I will now have to look up.
• SlaughterDM circa 1999 [239 KB]
  Here’s more use of the noise filter for every graphic and now the content boxes are misaligned in modern browsers because my code was a hack (“text-align: center” is not supposed to align <div> or <table>!). Why is there a download page when it’s only one link? Why not have that link on the front page? Also, what is SlaughterPM? Pre-menstrual? The logo could work if the typography wasn’t so borked. This is pretty much a demonstration that I found out how to change an images’ src attribute using JavaScript. I believe I actually changed the web site’s code after 2000 to use CSS. Hurrah!
• Alkali circa 2003 [744 KB]
  I think this one is repsectable simply because the content is so simple that you can’t really fail. Yet I somehow did since the page covers 100% of the width so in 1280×1024 mode, the lines in the news updates would be so wide that people would fall asleep trying to read a post (note: again, work on your metaphors). This design along with the others also seem to indicate that I don’t think about using pastel colours (wouldn’t they look fabulous!?). This was made during my tables hack-styled with CSS phase. I think those two updates are also mis-dated as Canada’s junior team won World’s in January of 2005. The green is still fugly.

I can now pray to albino, black baby Jesus that The Wayback Machine didn’t archive the full design for my old Doomnation web site that was _all_ brown or my ml.org site (pre-frad.org, bitches) that had blue (0, 0, 255) and red (255, 0, 0) pixel-by-pixel created logos and layout markers. It was a site to behold. Cornholed.

This fascination with my own personal destructions and design come full circle in my present activities redoing the AG @ Doomworld and Crucified Dreams web sites using pure XHTML/CSS. Once I got over the hump of not thinking in the mindset of every bit of content of tables, I started getting use to the fact that I fucking hate CSS and the inconsistencies with web browsers. I have received much help from verbatim from The Shack and Manc when it comes to getting the layouts I want, but most of my own experiments have been complete failures due to misunderstandings of [inline|block] for elements. I have had The Zen of CSS Design eBook downloaded for months but have been too lazy to get around to reading it. I also have about 100 URLs bookmarked on web design, standards, and layout how-tos.

Think I should spend time more wisely by looking for a job? Forgetaboutit.

• Dangerous Questions
• Layout Reservoir
• Content With Style
• Top 20 Web Design Tips of 2005
• Poor baby seals.

Not all Rio funk tracks are about violence; many are about sex. Out in Acari, on the outskirts of Rio, Valeska, the bleached-blonde lead singer of Gaiola das Popozudas—The Birdcage of Big-butted Babes—is teasing the crowd with their hit “Se Marcar”: “If you check me out, I’ll make out with you,” she sings. Behind her, three girls in skintight outfits grind out a dance routine. Halfway through their 20-minute set, Valeska invites a member of the audience onstage. She and each of the dancers take turns rubbing their bodies against him. “Show us your butt,” she shouts, and he bends over. Suddenly, a dwarf dressed as Trinity from The Matrix and holding a giant inflatable penis jumps out of the crowd onto the stage.

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