SEO Designs

The Legendary Elite is an alliance on the web-based game known as “Evony”. They are the #1 alliance on server 72 and have attained the highest gap in prestige between the number 1 and number 2 alliance - per those who have played many servers and have seen many differences in the numbers on those other servers.

There was a group created on Facbook for the members of the alliance to get to know each other outside of the game and to keep in touch with those who no longer play. The image created below is for the ‘logo’.

It’s been so long that I don’t recall how I found the image of the girl or where. There was some time spent on a site called boyis.com but I don’t go there very often anymore because of all the ads. The ads are so bad that the site slows way down. I think they’d do better with a donate button. Anyway. This is one of the few white background layouts created in the past. The reason I chose her was because she looked cute and innocent, yet quite deadly.

This layout was originally used for a site created specificially because I wanted to start portraying myself as a web designer/layout designer. Unfortunately I couldn’t afford to keep the domain name, so it’s no longer available. Most designers stay away from black for some reason while I embrace it. I simply enjoy using black backgrounds and bright colors. I don’t always use them, but I do enjoy them.

This layout used the Suddenly Spring brush found at brusheezy.com and Freebooter Script font for the title which can be found at 1001freefonts.com. Enjoy!

This is a more recent layout that I used on Disillusioned. I decided to put together several elements into one image. Yoruichi Shihoin in both her human form and her feline form. In the footer is the Hell Butterfly used to dispatch messages in Soul Society. All of these elements are copyright Tite Kubo/Viz Media/Shonen Jump. The background behind Yoruichi was created using grunge brushes. The font used to write Disillusioned I don’t recall unfortunately. I did however love that font. I made a matching Twitter background and when I find a copy of it I will upload it here. Until then, enjoy.

Lickable was the name of a blog I hosted for a friend. This is before I knew about background-lines and footers and how to make them work properly. Anyway, the colors of the layout are nice and bright, which makes it fun. I don’t even know what happened to the original image of the icecream cone/woman. It was probably another PSP tube, which is fine and dandy. Things were easily thrown together using PaintShopPro and using Adobe Photoshop goes a bit further with having to do many things on your own. Extracting images from their background is not as easy as it sounds (I’ve tried many times and tend to do a better job on my own).

Anyway, this layout was fun because of all the different colors involved that went together beautifully. It’s not often I use a lot of color in a layout, but I enjoy doing it once in awhile as a way to spice things up.

Yes, I used the forbidden female word: chick. Get over it. I don’t mind being called a chick - they are cute and adorable. This is an image map made May 13th of 2006. Yes, it’s way old and simplistic, but then again, all my splash pages have been. The simpler they are the quicker they load.

Most websites don’t use splash pages anymore, but then again it’s rare that people host each other anymore, or they simply link back and forth to each other. I find it easier to have a splash page to let people know there is more than once place they can visit on this site. Currently there are four places to visit now, but only two are linked. One is Disillusioned, the other is Otherside. The two that aren’t currently linked are this site and Sizzling Sensations. I don’t have a link to SS yet because I want more content up there, same thing with SEO Designs.

Anyway, I believe the anime girl was (again) a PSP Tube that I found and used. My main love of this splash page though is the text. It turned out beautifully. I used a lighting effect and being as that was in PSP, I don’t remember what it was. I haven’t figured out how to repeat this effect in Photoshop to such a beautiful look as of yet, but then I haven’t tried duplicating it either. Perhaps it’s time to figure that out.

Bare Essentials was one of the first layouts I did with a white background. I know that using a white background generally ‘increases’ the space of a website, sort of like having the walls and ceiling painted white in a house makes the room look larger than it is. This layout had a background-line but no footer. At the time I had recently learned how to create a background with a background-line but hadn’t quite figured out the footer part of it until later (taught by the same person).

I tend to be more about color, though, and generally choose black backgrounds for most of my designs simply because I can show off bright colors that way. I found the sketch of the woman in a PaintshopPro tube format and went from there.

Nowadays my layouts contain 3 items: The background-line which tiles down the page creating the containers for text and menu items; The background-layout which is the image that fills the background at the top; The footer at the bottom which contains the url for the main page (text, not link) and some form of matching or complementing design.

So what the heck is this design blog and why not just use Disillusioned? Well, I wanted a place where I could show off former designs that I’ve created not just for Disillusioned but maybe other sites as well. I have been wanting to do this for awhile now and will be showing past layouts (mainly from Disillusioned since it is the main site I have) and splash pages that have been used for SEO itself.

On a personal note, however, it is a place to show the changes over the years to my design style. There’s much more to this, of course. I am always looking to learn new things and go new places with design. I love a lot of the current trends but just don’t have it in me to follow with the crowd, either.

I’ve always been accused of being on the outside, ignoring trends and styles of the latest - aka the cutting edge. Why would I want to do what everyone else is doing when I can be more myself going down my own path, rocks, roots, and darkness along the way to enhance my own personal brand of imagination?

I look forward to comments from those who are interested in taking the time to look and see what I’ve created along with constructive criticism. Enjoy.