breaking in the new blog

i’ve had a blog through livejournal for almost six years now. it’s time to change it up a little bit.

the design of my banner went through a lot of failed attempts. the original idea was to take a particularly visually appealing portion of one of my modern-notation pieces and contrast-gradient the music into the existing gradient background. The problem with that is when you move a black foreground and a white background gradually to a white foreground and a black background, the middle foreground grey matches the background grey. can’t have that.

So i cut up parts of the music into three segments and tried to place them in such a way that they would flow from left to right, but it was too disjunct and too busy no matter what i did with the colors and the positioning. Unsatisifed, i nixed two of the segments and kept the accelerando and started fiddling with its placement. The original placement was smaller than what you see, gradienting to a stark white and existing below the “darkblog resonate” header.

The problem with that is that it left the middle very empty. Putting other music there had already proven to be unsuccessful, so i tried putting something else there, a textured treble clef not unlike the treble clef that I have in my livejournal icon, but after a week or so of looking at it and getting some general guidance from katie, it was determined that that just didn’t fit the bill.

I *think* i’m happy with the final design, for which i can thank katie for guidance. expanding the accelerando figure to encompass more of the screen and changing the gradient from a complete white to a spotlight grey feels more subtle and less intrusive.

i think that’s the 01:30 entry you’re going to get. As a “Grand Opening!” blog entry i think i pretty much failed, but i’m pretty happy with the bio page, so that makes it okay. If you haven’t read it yet, do, because it explains why i decided to create this blog in the first place.

and yeah. welcome to my new world.