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...

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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.

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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"

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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"

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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 although, it was kind of cool to see my whole desktop sliding down my monitor.

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That rules! It's all moving, and stuff.. Try this: Stretch instead of tile. It's even weirder.