When I first started using Windows 3.1 back in high school,
one of the first things that fascinated me was all of the
wallpaper bitmaps that I could use to decorate the screen.
I kept switching from leaves to cars in a parking lot to floating
chess pieces, to one of my all-time favorites, "tartan.bmp".
Although I was quite attached to my DOS commands, the ability
to have a red-and-black diagonal plaid background on my screen
allowed me to transition to the new technology much easier.
When I got into making webpages, one of my big things was
making wallpapers and background images for it. Although the
results are invariably amateurish, I've always tried to make
my own graphics and backgrounds, mostly because I think it's
fun to do and makes the webpage more unique and less "stamped
out". I also posted wallpapers as actual content. My
college webpage had a section where one could download a bunch
of Windows wallpaper bitmaps I made in Paint, which by the
late 90s, was already a retro thing to offer. Many of those
backgrounds evolved into the cubes and marbles I used to use
in my layouts for DEFORGE. Those backgrounds were nice work,
but the cubes especially made the page much louder than I
liked.
For the new layout, I wanted a simpler, less busy look, so
I scrapped most of the old backgrounds in favor of a series
of pixilated, textured, mostly single-color backgrounds. Here
are the backgrounds currently in use right now:
| This
is the blue background. It's being used as the header
for the "Writings" section. This was the first
of these new backgrounds that I made for the latest layout.
I wanted something more basic, but not something that
was a completely solid color, because I felt that was
too boring. So I took a basic solid blue image file and
ran it though the "film grain" filter in one
of my image manipulation programs to create this. I like
these backgrounds because they aren't so loud text can't
be overlaid on top of them. |
| This
is the gold background. It's being used for the header
to the "Puttering" section. It was made in the
same way as the other backgrounds, but was one of the
last to be created. I like how it looks- it looks a little
like gold leaf to me. |
| This
is the green background. This one was the third one I
made after blue and red. It's used for the "Unmarked
Box" section, which has always used a greenish color
scheme. The interesting thing about this one to me is
that I used the equivalent shade of green that I used
for blue and red (I think it was 102 on the RGB scale
for each or something like that), but the green background
is so much brighter than the other two. |
| This
is the gray background that I use in the header for all
of the main DEFORGE pages. Since I have a gargoyle as
a mascot, I thought gray would be the best color to use.
It somewhat reminds me of granite. Plus, I like how the
main pages are gray but the content pages are in color. |
| This
is the purple background. After I made the red, green,
blue, and gray backgrounds, I realized that I was going
to need a few more. This one isn't my favorite, though,
but after awhile it became challenging to come up with
new colors in this same style. I found that many colors
such as yellow and brown weren't suitable because they
were either too bright or too dark. Purple was in the
right range, though. It's used in the "Quizzes"
section. |
| This
is the red background. This is being used for "Cooking".
This was the second one of these I made. It's one of the
better-looking ones. |
| This
tan background is used for the "Photography"
section. Tan is normally considered a drab color, but
I think it works pretty well as a background. Out of my
old cubes background, I thought the tan cubes were one
of the best in that series. |
| I'm
still using this green marble background in the Unmarked
Box. I've been using it in one place or another at DEFORGE
since it was first started. |
| Finally,
I'm still using this plaid background in some places,
mostly because I'm known as a big fan of plaid shirts
and people expect this sort of thing out of me. This background
was originally done in Windows Paint many years ago, but
later on I blurred it in another graphics program, which
gave it the appearance of fabric. |
| |
