New Header, Updating The Pages, And Stuff

So Uh, Yeah.

Here is the header in question:

Am I proud? Hell yeah. I actually learnt something from doing this.

Little back story before we continue here. I'm big on vector design. It's my thing. Naturally I've spent much more time on Fireworks than I have on Photoshop. Sure every now and then I come across an occasion where I'm required to use Photoshop for it's fabulous filters, but for the most part I use Fireworks.

However, for this banner idea I wanted to do something a bit "flashy" and decided to incorporate a GIF into it. My initial idea was to have two GIFs actually, one of Chitoge (which made it) and one of Mashiro (which sadly did not make it). So now I had to set about to make the GIFs have a transparent background. Fun.

I've seen people edit GIFs through Photoshop, but never Fireworks, so I pulled up chitoge.gif in Photoshop and sat there just wondering what to do. 6 frames of animation. Now what? Guess it's time to start removing the background. I click the pen tool and fail within a minute. It was different from the pen tool in Fireworks that I so dearly loved, so I had to do a bit of research online to figure it out. After learning the one mistake I had been making, I corrected it and was well on my way.

Successfully completing the removal of one frame, I moved onto the next. However the twist was that I didn't know how GIFs worked in Photoshoop. I messed up everything and had to restart. I was irritable and considered dropping this whole idea and using a still image instead, but for some reason I continued. Eventually I learnt the secret behind the GIFs and by then I had already invested too much time into this little project. So instead of using the pen tool like a proper designer, I cheated and took a shortcut with the magic wand tool.

Of course that's why the GIF looks bad to an extent. I moved onto Mashiro only to find that I messed up while saving it. The background had a colour similar to her hair, so the magic wand tool was out of question. I decided to not put Mashiro into the banner (laaaaaaaaame).

So there you have it. If you want to learn how to do any of this or have any questions, feel free to just post or shoot me an email. I'm also open to suggestions and such if you're interested.

I'm going to go shower. After I'm done I'll go and work on updating the other pages of this blog (last update was around February I think). Later then.

I'm an 8 for today.

"We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation." - Ivan Illich