I’ve been work­ing for the past sev­eral days, in between bouts of pack­ing, on devel­op­ing the new Roundbottom site design.    You can check out a sta­tic HTML pre­view here.  None of the links work, so don’t click on them, but mouse over them for fun, espe­cially at the top.  For newer read­ers, Roundbottom is my steam­punk photography/short fic­tion project, cen­tered around a steam­punk nat­u­ral­ist and his adventures.

A cou­ple of things to note about this new design.  The flash video of the gears is still comp and needs to be pur­chased as well as com­pressed.  It sits at 2 megs right now which is just way too heavy a file for some­thing silly like that.  I should be able to reduce its file size con­sid­er­ably once I buy the video.

I’m using, as in the first design, SiFR font replace­ment on the head­ers, and SWIFR to style the main images and the gra­vatar images.  These are flash based tech­nolo­gies that are great uses of Flash.  They both should degrade fairly grace­fully, although the main header font is ridicu­lously huge with­out the styling.

I’ve been grab­bing resources from all over the place for this one, hence the planned “design cred­its” page.  It’ll include a link back to my port­fo­lio site, but as well list all the free resources I used in the design and link to them.

You might notice the Foundation stuff.  That’s lay­ing the ground­work for the Roundbottom club, basi­cally. More on that later.  It’s an exper­i­ment that will sink or swim depend­ing on a vari­ety of things.    The other thing you might notice is the Encyclopedia link.  My intent is to set up a wiki page for keep­ing track of Roundbottom’s world, cast of char­ac­ters, and so on.  I am pretty sure I will open up edit­ing of this to the fans.   I’m think­ing hard about ways to encour­age audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion here. I want the com­ment sec­tion to be a delight­ful place of steam­punk char­ac­ters not of my cre­ation.  Hence the “More Steampunk” sec­tion.  We’ll see how that works.

Overall, I think I’ve vastly improved upon the old design.  Cross browser com­pat­i­bil­ity should be rel­a­tively cleared up.  The images can be larger and more detailed.  And the design really says “clock­punk” now.

Please do let me know if you notice any major glar­ing errors in ren­der­ing.  There are a few things that IE 6 doesn’t get right, but for the most part, it looks okay there.  Obviously, more mod­ern browsers should han­dle it better.

I can’t wait to get this thing up and run­ning and to start rolling out new, fresh steamy con­tent.  I’ve got some great sto­ry­lines lined up for this sum­mer that I think you’re really going to enjoy.

One last thing! Design type folks, if you have any tech­ni­cal ques­tions about how I did some­thing or why I did some­thing, do please ask!  I’d love to talk shop on this one.

Tagged as: Flash, Photography, roundbottom, steampunk, webdesign