Layout 145 - African Vines

Website Standin’ In the Spotlight

Theme Africa Vines

Design
December 08, 2007. Multiply, Hue/Saturation effects were used for this layout. The image was taken from Disney and then vectored and colored slightly to blend in with the soft background in gradient

Challenge
The footer layouts are more difficult because of playing with navigation. I thought it was challenging on what to do on the top, and it was only later that I decided a tree/vine

Process
This layout was actually very easy comparatively since I love Lion King and could really put my heart into it. I was tired of constantly using bright and pastel colors, so I decided that I would go for a totally different type of mood: dark and vivid. Hence, I used much darker colors. I first cleaned up the image by simply running it through Live Trace in Illustrator. Then, I went ahead and vectored underneath, fixing lines and adding some nice shades here and there. This ended up working really well, though I realized much later that I messed up the color of the leaves around Simba, making them green instead of brown (which I didn’t change since that would make the layout much too brown).

After vectoring, I decided that I would make a footer layout since I really liked the vine the best, and wanted to make that the center of attention (remember, I was in my objects love-phase since the last three layouts), and wanted to do this. Since Kari’s fanlisting did not have overwhelming amounts of text or content, the footer navigation really worked out well- it was also something I wanted to try since I didn’t do CSS footer links with hovers before, which ended up being a bit tougher than I thought lol.

The only thing I regret in this layout is that it seems to give a feeling of something missing. Maybe I should have added a bird or something… But I was hitting the deadline and didn’t have time to figure it out. Also, the footer with Simba’s head was a bit troublesome since there was a lot of empty space, and I haven’t quite figured out how to do the bottom alignment with div as of yet…

Description
Simba standing in the footer, with vines overhead as the header image. Links reside on the bottom with overlaps featuring screenshots in the little boxes.