Hello And welcome to 'The City' of Angels, a personal portfolio site. I am ubik, a 5+ year freelance graphic designer. I have just began to design my websites in CSS. I feel that CSS really gives you much control over all of your content. I'm glad that I switched from photoshop slices, and dreamweaver tables to hand-coding all my work. gotta love that notepad, especially the 'Find' feature.
This design took me about 3 days to make, 1 whole day to design the banner, lol and another full day to debug ;) All images have been created by myself and you wont find that banner anywhere else on the net, It's a ubik 1 of a kind. The clouds came from a royalty free image of a los angeles beach sunset. The buildings are Los Angeles and I toned them to almost nothing but shadows. The purple colorings inside the buildings are sample texture from some purple lighting. And alot of touch up work went into the image, hope you like it.
This page validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict and valid CSS. Tested and Tweaked to suit the needs of:
I like to write clean, simplified HTML. I believe that all of the complexity should go into your CSS/JavaScript Files (This design uses absolutely no JavaScript). It's good practice to write easily human readable code and keep it all non-inline.
I thought I would add this little section for people who want to download and customize this template. If you have Photoshop, you can open each picture in the template then in the top main menu go to IMAGE -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation. The HUE is to toggle the main color in the image. Saturation is nice, it lets you adjust the vividness of the color, if its too bright tone the saturation down a bit. When you're finished go to File -> Save For Web. Under settings you should use JPEG compression either HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW.
No Photoshop?.. No Problem! 'The Gimp' is an excellent alternative to Photoshop, it is opensource and FREE! The Gimp was written for Linux/Unix Operating Systems, but you can run it on a Windows Platform by first installing the GTK Runtime Environment. You can download it all here:
http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.htmlThe first link on that page is The Gimp Application, the second link is the GTK RunTime environment needed to run GIMP, and the third link is the GTK RunTime Environment for Windows98/ME and NT4.
The GIMP Interface runs best at 1024x768 resolution. Once you have the GIMP installed you can open up any image from the toolbox by going to File -> Open. Then on the image if you'll notice it has a menu right above it, go to LAYER -> COLORS -> HUE-SATURATION. 'Master' controls all the colors in the image, toggle the Hue to change the main colors. Saturation is to adjust the vividness of the color in the image. Have Fun.
I live in the Los Angeles County and I first began to design party flyers, back when I was around 16, about 5 years ago.. I was inspired by a Top Notch graphic design company who were the leading party flyer designers. They had designers that not only worked with Photoshop/PaintshopPro/corel, but also 3D Studio Max and such.. I must say their designs were awe inspiring. My cousin and I, then set out to compete with them. If am 'technique' then he is 'True Skill', much props go out to him.. he's the real artist between the two of us, and so we did pretty good in designing until the whole thing just phased out and so now here I am, lol.. designing websites trying to start a revolution, haha. ;)
As for this design, ofcourse all of the images came in just under 25KB :) What can I say, I love graphic design. I'll end it with a favorite quote:
"Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life." -Confucius