WIP: The Revised Roundbottom Site
Filed Under: Graphic Design, Speculative Fiction, Web Design
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.
