Topic: An honest opinion
started by: Mike
On the other hand, the coloring scheme is cool, although sticking to 2 colors in the "yo" and "links" headings just to make the .gifs more efficient may be too much of a tradeoff. Also, your main logo is quite well optimized and could be even smaller if it were not dithered. Still, <6K is quite a good logo size. Some sites *cough* detnet *cought* have logos in excess of 26K which are annoying to download...
If you are using a monochromatic coloring scheme, it is generally a good idea to vary the intensities of the color that you use. It looks to me like right now all of your images are the same bright green; adding some darker shades of green with the same hue would give the site a more high-tech look.
One last thing: all of your links are the same color as your text. Using a different color for the links would be a good idea, so that people know where to click...
For god sakes, get rid of that moving background. It hurts. That's a good place to mix the colores up a bit. With everything being in green, I feel like I'm on my old XT with the green setting pressed on the monitor (although this site looks like the amber button has been pressed).
quote:
Originally posted by askheaves:
Lighten it up with a mixing of greens and blue or purple. Maybe even a little bit of metallic texture scattered around.
You are just using too bright a shade of green. 100\% green is brighter than red or blue on the monitor, so it just stands out too much. That suggestion of metallic texture is an excellent one; if you are going for a sort of monochrome console look, include metallic looking parts which will correspond to areas that aren't the screen itself.
To get a good metallic look in Photoshop, there are several things you can do. My favorite is to add monochromatic noise and then a long motion blur to get a brushed metal look, but you can also use clouds and a multiply effect to add a bit of variation. The key to a metallic look is not having just one plain color, but gradients. That, and shading the edges to get a 3D effect.
As for the green stuff, monochrome writing would usually have a green glow around it, so you could try copying the green areas to a new layer, doing a gaussian blur on that layer, and setting its mode to "lighten." This creates a glow around everything.
This message has been edited by Michael on November 02, 2000 at 11:18 AM
The key to making metal look real is imperfection. Scratches and dents on the surface, rust, etc. are a good way to do this. For rust, create a layer with mode "color burn" and around 50\% opacity. Then just spraypaint the rust into the corners, in a pattern as random as possible. For dents and scratches, create a new layer, spraypaint a random pattern on the surface of the metal, do a gaussian blur, emboss, and switch the layer mode to "overlay."
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"if brute force doesn't work, you aren't using enough"
thanks - Mike
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"if brute force doesn't work, you aren't using enough"
although, it was kind of cool to see my whole desktop sliding down my monitor.------------------
Of course, that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong. -Dennis Miller
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"if brute force doesn't work, you aren't using enough"
quote:
Originally posted by Blain:
hehe, i just tiled that background gif as my desktop wallpaper. Now my eyes hurt and i can't stand up streight
That rules! It's all moving, and stuff.. Try this: Stretch instead of tile. It's even weirder.
oh yeah, in case you are wondering about the times on the news posts, i just started using newspro yesterday, and i converted all of the old posts over to it. If someone knows how to change the dates on posts in newspro, the help would be greatly appreciated.
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"if brute force doesn't work, you aren't using enough"
This message has been edited by Mike on November 02, 2000 at 12:08 PM