Appassionato

Loyalty is difficult when it’s ugly!

Categorised as Design, Site-Related & tagged with blog, Design, law, uni, wow.

I’m currently going through the busiest time of my semester so far:

1. 1500-word essay.
2. Legal Research assignment.
3. Moot (mock case trial).
4. 3000-word essay.

But, enough with the excuses, for I have still been spending some hours here and there on World of Warcraft for breaks. I’ve written a few draft blog posts, but never put in the effort to finish them for pub­lish­ing, because I don’t get that blogging mood often when I’m pub­lish­ing posts to a layout I feel is ugly.

I still like some concepts of this design: the colours, the organ­isa­tion of the footer, the comments link… but I feel funkiness may be what keeps me inter­ested in my own blog when I have to spend perhaps 10 hours each week on it, despite having des­per­ately wanted a min­im­al­istic design.

So here’s going into a new design brain­storm­ing stage again…

One blog post for the past year

Categorised as Design, Personal, Romance, School, Site-Related & tagged with gaming, Internet, maplestory, relationships, uni, wow.

In the last post, I said that the business card design was the first step in getting to this version 20 design. Guess what? I lied. I almost forgot that I had ever designed what I should now refer to as Appas­sionato Version 19.5. Indeed, this is the reason I once blamed Sheng Han for using a header back­ground image similar to mine:

Appas­sionato Version 19.5 (Click above image to see the live version)

All my guy friends thought this was the best design I’ve ever came up with, totally un-Rilla style, and it’s actually the first photo manip­u­la­tion I’ve done. Reasons why I didn’t go through with it:

• It looked perfect on my 1024 x 768 screen, but when I switched to a laptop with 1280 x 800 screen I realised that it was too small.
• The file size of all the images was too big for a blog.
• No one ever notices my favourite part of the design: the hanging wire aka “skip to footer” link.

Main crux of this blog post however: summary of the past year of my life.
Read more…

One year hiatus is over!

Categorised as Design, Romance, Site-Related & tagged with Design, hiatus.

As you can see below, my last post was 3 April 2009. Meaning I’ve been such a big fail and took more than a year to come up with a new design and change my CMS from own-coded to WordPress. But that latter part was the horrible part. I had to manually transfer all the posts one by one (because I wanted to proofread them all) and even­tu­ally decided I was too tired to bother with the comments. Anyway, let me show you what design concepts I went through before deciding on this one.

Steps of getting to this design

First I made a business card design, just playing around.

Header design

Read more…