Styles
I work with data: queries and totals, rows and columns. This web site is an opportunity for me to get a little more creative.
Implemented
Bare
The baseline. This style offers maximum readability, and was the test bed I used for the original layout.
Flow
With the look and feel of a UML diagram, this style is meant to emphasize linearity and clarity.
Metro
Everyone's had that moment where you wake up in the middle of the night and, rather than toss or turn, you take your vague idea and build something out of it. This was the result. I'm not really satisfied with it; the beautiful HDR background deserves a comparably elegant foreground.
Smoke
The was my first genuine style (Bare really doesn't count). Smoke was inspired by a single image on a Fortean phenomenon web site, where a string of fuzzy blobs appeared on a horizontal line. I built the top-level headers on this concept (for example, the caption above the calendar), and the resulting smoky look inspired the rest.
Ideas
Arcade
Big round buttons for controls, trails of dots, a maze-life background, cherries and other fruit for bullets.
Ash
Soft dark grays, with a macro shot of falling ash in the background.
Audio
Wires connect boxers, with speakers in the background and twitching oscilliscopes here and there.
Biologic
Slick black plastic merges with bone and wire; inspired by H.R. Giger.
Boiler
Rusty pipes, big iron bolts, dripping junctions, animated steam vents.
Circuit
Inspired by the inside of a computer, with a brightly-colored motherboard in the background, plus capacitors, chips, heat sinks, and animated cooling fans.
Cypher
A knock-off of everyone's favorite sophomoric hacker movie from 1999, where green text streams down and screen artifacts twitch in the corner of your vision.
Gears
A more modern version of Boiler, where pistons, rods, and gears intersect and spin. Specifically inspired by the RX-8 rotary engine.
Seamless
No contrasting lines at all, aside from the text: just soft curves and shades.
Static
Monospace fonts, CRT distortion, and animated static "snow".
Steel Monkeys
A sky-faded distant view, with a crane in the foreground lifting the nav bar, which is surrounded by a metal frame.