Designs of doom

The many designs and redesigns of this site.

by Dave McAwesome

For my own archival amusement (and yours, I suppose, but if you're interested in MA archival material, ya probably got a few screws loose). Doubtless, you remember the first anniversary article in which I reminisced about the very first design of this site. Let's look at it again, shall we? Close your eyes...

Mark 1. Jan. 2005

In my defense, I was focusing on making sure the site functioned properly more than anything else. This was my very first foray onto the--I think you call it the 'Intercrap.' Look at the bottom. I used the European day-month-year format to date the updates. I only succeeded in confusing myself. Yes, I grant it is a superior system with a sound internal logic. Alas, I am a dumb American. Month, day, year for me. This lasted about a week.

Mk.2. Jan. 2005 to Oct. 2006

Moving on to design 2. You can open your eyes now. What do you mean they've been open? Oh, you poor sod. Move. Ing. On.

Week 2 sported this blue/orange combo. Some folks get weird about seeing blue and orange together. Not a lot of Syracuse fans, I guess. I think there's something genetically wrong with you if you don't like blue and orange together. They're complementary colors, fer cryin' out loud. Complementary. You know what that means?

Blue: You look smashing today, Orange.
Orange: Cheers, Blue. What a cracking tophat you have on.
Blue: Ha, you devil. I didn't think you'd notice. You did a fluminious job with your tulips this year. I've been meaning to mention that.
Orange: Cheers again, mate. You're quite fluminious yourself.

That's called a cheap laugh. It has a street value of 32 cents. Thirty-three in Washington Square (damn those immoral NYU kids...). That's the trouble with complimentary/complementary.

I wanted to get away from the red and purple. It was too dark, but I always wondered if the light blue and peach were too light. Overall, I liked this simple design. The left gradient took me several tries to get it just right. I rounded the top 'by hand,' so to speak, with a swish of a soft erase brush. It was one of those, "I can't believe I got it; let me save this quick before lightning strikes my computer and summons Thor who poops all over my files" moments. I tend to have those occasionally. The bottom line is: I like this. I don't love this. It's okay. Serviceable. Not quite fluminious. Adequate. It brims with adequacivity.

Mk.3. Nov. 2006 to May 2008

Although I liked the big, bold "Maximum" on the old design, I wanted to try something vastly different for the next design. I wanted to create an over-the-top effect with a smaller font size. I used various combinations of broken and debased fonts with varieties of old english and blackletter fonts. Savatoons made the devil horned demon thingy. She was helpful with feedback as I worked. I was thrilled with my logo in the top left. The problem was, it forced my hand with the colors. I had to retain the color scheme with the nameplate. Despite numerous attempts, I don't believe I ever got it just right. Frank pointed out that the two fonts were disjointed. I designed an improvement, but I never uploaded it in favor of redesigning the whole mess. I'm surprised I left this up as long as I did.

On the other hand, I love the left-hand menu buttons. They rock. I had redesigned my forum in Dec. 2006. I designed menu buttons for MA to echoed those. I thought it would help connect the site and the forum a little more. Although the nameplate was up by the end of October, the menu buttons weren't up until January. The sight of the red/blue nameplate with orange/blue menu bar is one I will spare you. With the red/blue logo and nameplate came a new red/blue CSS. In fact, the whole CSS changed. The resulting home page breathed more. I wasn't in love with the return of the dark red, but there you go. Despite the many hours I put into it, I consider this design a failure. It always looked disjointed. It never conveyed the over-the-top-ness I intended. The menu buttons are great. The logo is great. But the nameplate is weak, and there is little cohesion to the elements. To me, the words 'maximum awesome' are very silly. The nameplate doesn't capture that. It's almost intimidating--or faux intimidating...like some dork who just got an OE tattoo of the word 'strength' across his back.

Mk.4. May 2008

I got to the point where I couldn't stand the nameplate anymore. I wanted a design that echoed the product labels of the early 1900s without looking too dated. The older style coupled with the silly MA name would fix everything I had so far botched. It looks great in my head. You know what the problem with that is? I have to translate that into a graphics program.

I'm not a draftsman. I can doodle, but I don't draw everyday. I don't have a magic ink pen. I'm very limited with the kinds of things I can design well, and even simple designs take me a lot of time to execute properly. I get a lot of mileage out of taking a little innocuous image off the web and modifying it into something else. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. The last two designs relied solely on font manipulation (I think I used at least five different fonts for design 3--that's generally considered a no-no in designer parlance, but they were similar enough that I thought I could do something interesting with them). This design was more of a true design. I tried a few different font styles around a piece of filigree. I designed a piece of old paper that would serve as the background. I originally frayed the edges and rolled them up like a scroll, but that gave off a medieval vibe. Instead, I decided to use the filigree as a border. I modified a small picture of a pillar and stuck that in to provide the left and right borders. I used a smaller version of the logo in the top left. It looks so much better. I'm not sure why I didn't do that earlier. I considered changing the menu buttons, but, honestly, I'm not sure what I'd change them to. If I use the filigree, the button text would have to be much smaller. I don't like that. I like navigation buttons that you can read. In the end, I left them.