Art · Devlog · Updates

A Tawdry Treasure of Nostalgic Love for Web Design

After the death of Phillip Mk. V (my phone), I wanted to work on something else for a while. Up until the point my phone died, I managed to wrap up on a few tasks. Completed revisions to a few of the posted comic pages. Finished the First draft pencils for the rest of the 1st chapter. Most exciting of these tasks was a fun little photoshoot I did for some buttons I sell. But that went awry fast. Phone died. Photos lost. Sorrow. Didn’t feel like doing anything or working on tasks anymore. So with all that in considered, I decided to do some more work on the website. After all, what better way to cheer myself up than with a little web design?

This isn’t only an update post about recent changes to the site. I’m also using this space to reflect on past experiences with browsing online and my original goals for this website. Then, I’ll consider which of those goals I’ve met so far and how the remaining goals are changing moving forward.

An Internet, long lost to the past

Before social media apps became such a mainstream staple of online interaction, web-communities gathered in more disparate forms. From Internet Forums to Yahoo! Groups, Chatrooms, MMORPG guilds, and so many others. If you were chronically online enough, you eventually just fell into an internet rabbit hole following some niche interest. Your pursuit inevitably led you to others that shared your weird interests and you eventually found community. These kinds of communities are still around. And these rabbit hole adventures still happen, but there are new and different dimensions to them now.

It wasn’t only about the people you met, though. The phrase “escheresque” loses meaning attempting to describe the imaginary, liminal geography of the old internet. Ancient web pages, abandoned for years without updates. Secret hyperlinks, hidden in the punctuation marks of some suspicious paragraph. Messages in the alt-text. The internet felt like a digital wilderness littered with cyber fun houses and niche digital archives. Many webmasters would bridge their sites together in networks called webrings and compete for top spots.

Sometimes, I lament over this internet as though it were an old thing long lost to the past. An ancient internet. Buried under some digital form of stratigraphic layering. Layers of networks, formed by social media, clickbait articles, and Top 10 whatevers websites that dominate the current digital landscape. However, maybe it’s more likely that I’m lagging behind, in some form of ongoing cyber-shock. If Social media is a sprawling digital city, I want to escape to the electric wilderness. With so many responsibilities piling up, I haven’t been online in the same ways as when I was growing up.

It’s been awhile since I wandered out deep into those old woods.

Web Design by a 90’s kid, nostalgic for a cyber world from the Past

In my online wanderings as a smaller human, I mainly sought out Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros content. Sprite comics, fanart, fangames, fanfiction, music. Many nights in my youth, spent tirelessly combing through various online archives in search of treasures. Fan content for that stuff was scarce way back then, so every little crumb felt like a precious jewel. There were other pursuits but those were my main obsessions when I was younger. I remember crawling through all sorts of strange and …interesting websites.

Some of my favorite creators established webcomic sites and online communities using early Angelfire/Geocities web builders with external forums.

Then, one day, I found Angelfire’s old html editor and learned this magic little string of runes:

<html>
<head>
<title>Mage Punk Archives</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

As certain means of hosting/displaying your work became untenable over time, web communities would uproot and migrate somewhere else. I suppose it’s still a little bit like that today.

In this vast, near-infinitely-spanning liminal space called the internet, I learned that you can claim a realm of your own.

Regardless, I fell in love with web design on the spot. Combing through some hard drives, I might find some old “websites” I made in my highschool web design class. Pure HTML sites, crafted in the form of notepad files and scanned artwork. I loved that class and the teacher that taught it. I took the elective with my prior Angelfire experience so I could jump ahead and nab some free internet time. Teach didn’t mind thanks to my fascination with experimenting in HTML, as if I were learning sorcery.

Web Design while dissociating through an otherwise fruitless college course.

Eventually, I left Angelfire behind to experiment with various other platforms that had popped up for posting art online. With college weighing down on me, my love for web building wavered. Yearning to return to my old hobby, I took what I mistook for a web design course. In actuality, it was a Digital Portfolio class; taught by an overly traditionalist Oil Painter.

In the first few weeks of class, the professor insisted on teaching us Macromedia Flash? We were a mixed class of fine art, animation, and illustration students. So while I could understand how Flash would be a great presentation medium for some, it’s not universally applicable. I eventually tuned the class out and did my own thing. As the professor fumbled through teaching us how to present our portfolios online professionally, I revisited old web design projects.

Though I’m more of a hobbyist, I considered including web design as part of my graduating portfolio. Even at a beginner level, it seemed like a skill/interest worth showing off. Most of the class saw their websites as just vectors for presenting their works online. Their goals involved a lot of letting the work speak for itself. On the other hand, I saw my site itself as another portfolio piece worth showing off.

Sure, some basic portfolio or social media site might suffice for simply displaying my hard work. But where’s the showmanship? Where’s the love?? Could it even really be called a presentation??? It’d be like confining my work to plain black frames with plain mats; and hanging them in some plain gallery.

How typical. How drab.

Later, that professor eventually repented on insisting we use Flash; and introduced us to Wix.com instead. I trashed that idea shortly after trying it out and went back to exploring other platforms.

Portfolio? Webcomic? Labyrinth? Let’s get the ball rolling.

Along with being my portfolio, I wanted flexibility in how I use this site to present content online. It wasn’t just about meeting graduation requirements; it also was about setting down foundations to build on for the future. My graduating portfolio largely featured Mage Punk as a contiguous overarching project. It only made sense that the website be part of and continue that project.

Inspired by all the webcomics and manga scanlations I was reading, I decided to build a webcomic site. I bounced around a different web builders until I settled on a WordPress site with the ComicPress theme installed. This solution felt like it offered the most flexibility in terms of ease and functionality.

A screenshot of Mage Punk Archives before considering UX in web design

It wasn’t the prettiest thing out of the box, but it worked like I needed it to. I uploaded my art. Installed any necessary plugins and started teaching myself CSS to get it looking how I wanted it to. Arranged my widgets. Created social media accounts and linked to them.

Scrolling through the blog archives you’ll come across some of my “devlog” posts for this site. It’s not the most thorough or detailed devlog. Written by an amateur, and reads drier than a mouthful of sand. At least, it’s a good checkpoint marker for the website’s growth and development. It’s not the most groundbreaking or exciting webcomic site there is, but I’m fairly content with my progress for now.

Fusing web design and illustration.

http://www.DresdenCodak.com
  • Created new icons for the menubar
  • Reformatted the website.
    • Changed the site width. Made it a little more compact.
    • Removed the sidebar
    • Recent posts on the front page are now more compact in appearance.
    • Added a Gallery and a placeholder page for the Shop.
    • Revised the About section a little.
      • Might just move this info to the bottom of the front page and turn this space into a Profiles section.
    • Tidied up the Archives page a little.
  • Uploaded comic revision and wrote full posts for each one
    • Created new comic title cards (seen on the front page)
    • Added published dates to the comic page titles to account for reordering.

While the sidebar was useful for putting out a lot of static info at once, it made the front page a little too busy/cluttered. I like the simplicity of the no-column layout and the challenge of giving everything a fair chance at being seen. I still have to re-implement many of the widgets that were there into the current layout of the front page but I think that it can wait for now.

The first time around, I made them too big and detailed for the size they’d be displayed at, so I used the default ComicPress navbar for a while instead. You’ll probably still see a few of these make their way into the pages of this site as little spot illustrations. It’d be a shame to let them just sit in the gallery.

Sometime before I started working on the site again, I started work on some little icon illustrations as a break from some beetle and flower studies that I was doing at the time. Before I knew it –(no, actually, it took about a week of work. I totally knew the whole time.) –before. I. knew. it. I’d made a whole set of illustrated graphics for the site.

Finally, after the brief bouts of web design it was time for comic revisions to go up.

Lesson learned I think.

I’d mentioned doing revisions on the pages I’d posted but I’d rather go into more detail about this in a separate post (The Big Update Part 3: End). For this post I only wanted to mention and show off the title cards that I made for the front page. Before the update, I made these smaller title card images that went in the side bar. They were fun to make, but I’m more attracted to the idea of using splash images on the front page.

Basically, there was a lot of image editing near the end

From the time I first dipped my toes into it in college, to the many years of putting it off or not having enough time at once, it has been an interesting ride tinkering around and learning to use WordPress. It currently feels like a Chimera-esque menagerie of plugins and self-taught CSS. I still have a lot to learn but I’m at a good enough stopping point for the time being. I’ve spent as much time as I could working on this site for the past two weeks (counting illustrations and image editing). It’s been an experience.

It’s time to start drawing again.

Unfortunately, I only ever have enough time for one project at any extended period of time. I’ll do my best to find a good balance between working on projects and posting here consistently. I still have a handful of small spot illustrations and banners that I want to draw for the site but nothing too numerous or complex. This coming Sunday, I want to try to post the 1st draft pencils for the rest of Chapter 1. I’ll also be writing one last post explaining what I have planned for Mage Punk and how I hope to present it on this site. I also have a ton of older art that I’ll be uploading in the coming weeks. After that blog posts should hopefully be a little more succinct than these have been.

I do love to ramble.

★★★