I've had my domain for years though I've never done a thing with it. Well nothing outside of temporary storage and a little image hosting for a LiveJournal blog I haven't touched in years that is. I had meant to just buy a domain name but didn't realize at the time that buying a hosting package with it, was not a requirement. I found out otherwise not long after but since I wasn't doing anything with it, I never bothered to shop around for a better deal. Until last Friday.
After 5 or so odd years of overpaying for a tiny amount of space, I've finally moved my site. I decided to try out
HostGator.com. They charge about the same as I was paying before but now I have unlimited space as opposed to slightly under 1GB. And the CPanel has a lot more noob friendly tools in it. I'm sure it was only because I really didn't have a website to speak of that the move happened lighting fast. They said it would take 24-48 hours but the switch was immediate as soon as I updated the nameservers and uploaded my sad little "under construction" index file haha. I can't believe I neglected it so long...couldn't even bother to put up a proper temporary page, bad bad Mars.
Anyways, it was such a smooth and satisfying experience, I went ahead and registered another domain for my future (hopefully not fantasy) career in web/graphic design and/or animation production company. I figured it would keep me motivated to keep practicing on my own till I can afford to go back to school, during this crappy time of rejection and let downs. I guess it worked at least a little because as soon as the sites were up and running, I started creating a temporary page for both.
I found this pretty cool tutorial on
PSD Tuts+ for a road cone. It can be found at
Illustrate a Traffic Cone Icon in Photoshop. Apparently it was originally published in Czech so the translation is a tiny bit shaky at times but still pretty understandable. And beginners beware...you definitely have to fill in a few blanks yourself to achieve some of the differences you'll notice in the screen caps between one step and the next that are not explained or even referred to at all. But that turned out to be a good thing because it challenged me and I ended up learning some badass tricks I've never heard of before.
This is what I came up with...
And then here are screencaps of the two SUPER quick temporary pages I literally threw together yesterday, showcasing my shiny new road cone...
I was kind of in a hurry because it was getting close to the time I usually pick up my kids, so I just did some simple text with a drop shadow. Then I did a basic gradient to chop and repeat vertically with CSS, and added a blueish back light that matched the text and background palette. It didn't make sense to me to use purple (or any other color that had nothing to do with the general design) like the tutorial had suggested, hence the blue. Then I uploaded the separate parts, and coded them all back together again. The screencaps are a bit on the wide side because I have a wide screen monitor and I prefer a maximized window for my browser. I set the body's background color to match the light blue in the gradient so there would be a seamless background fill on maximized setups like mine... I hate empty whitespace around sites.
It's been a REALLY long time so I had to refer back to
W3Schools for a couple syntax brain farts hehe ;). And in retrospect, I probably should have reversed the gradient...at least I think so but only because of the gloss on the cone, but I just didn't like the way it looked that way when I tried it. This is all temporary anyway, and MOST importantly, a learning experience. I will get around to finding a comprehensive light source tutorial eventually, right now it's all about honing what I already know and challenging myself to take on the tools I have struggled with in the past, like the pen tool...you've bested me before punk, but it's on now ;).
That's all for now, the dishes and laundry await...oh joy of joys.
