In previous installments of this newly minted series covering the redesign of my site, I first created a prototype. Finding it a bit lacking, I took a look at the status of contemporary design in the game-console world in order to find my muse. Now, I look back at my past work and start the real work of designing my new theme at the most basic — and tricky — level: Colour.

Colour evokes the quickest and most natural reaction from a reader. The right mix of colour can make the difference between a balanced clean look, a horrible eyesore, a busy impenetrable mass, a boring field of monotony, or an avant-garde masterpiece. Looking back at the Xbox 360 design graph, let’s make our own version and plot some of my old site designs on it to see what we can learn.

The placements can be most easily defined by colour:

• LZLH stands for “LittleZephyr’s Little House”: My first website, created 5 years ago, and like many other personal sites of the time hosted on Geocities. It consisted of huge white boxes with horrible big ugly black border, and a subdued blue for links. LZLH v2 marked the first time I used orange.
• Arcosys came about during the big move to a real host and sported a brand new minimalist and crappy design this time combining orange and dark blue together. The later arcosys v2 update made the jump to a happier, cleaner, brighter look.
• Now I switched to WordPress and its default horrible green theme. Customized that theme a great deal, but then 1.5 came along with it’s new default theme. Seen on lazy blogger’s pages everywhere, Kubrick was very… default looking: heavy on neutral greys and blues. I customized Kubrick a bit, leading us to where we are now.

With these things in mind, I think I can take ArcoLZ in a new direction while retaining some the the positive feeling of my arcosys v2 design. My skills as a designer are good enough that I can move away from the boxy “CSS-Borders” look and into something more classy and pleasing. Thus, moving away from the “mild” and “architectural” to something more “organic” and slightly more “wild”. Knowing what I have done in the past and where I want to go in the future, let’s take a look at the building blocks we can use to get there.

Onward to page two.

In the last installment of this newly minted series, I screwed around with an idea of how to proceed with a redesign of this site. — It was written at midnight and full of crap, and so I seek new veins of inspiration.

Which brings us to this year’s E3: The Electronic Entertainment Expo. The big three videogame companies are all debuting their newest devices, and some the the stuff is quite interesting:

Microsoft has the Xbox 360

Attempting to move away from the massive black and green box of the original Xbox, they’ve made it all white and curvy. More on this later.

Sony has the Playstation 3

I don’t really know what they were thinking. This looks not only boring with it’s chrome finish, but also looks like it was awkwardly slapped together in some CAD program. Let’s hope some things change for the better before it is released in 2006.

Nintendo has the Revolution (and Game Boy Micro)

The new Revolution is big move from the big N. Of course it’s going to come in different colours, but the slick boxy look has a very modern feeling, leagues away from the previous Nintendo consoles. The GB Micro is designed to appeal to the fashion sense with it’s chrome finish and backlit screen.

These devices are for-better-or-for-worse the latest and greatest in consumer design. Let’s take a look about what we can learn from each of these things.

Onward to page two.

The default theme is 1.5 is pretty yet bland. A proper look for a default theme, but never anything good when it’s your own site.

So I’ve been working on making ArcoLZ a bit prettier. Take a look at the mock-up:

I want to take kubrick, throw it through the LittleZephyr blender, and give it some personality. Something about the rounded edges is just *boring* though. I dunno. I’ll experiment.

Suggestions and comments needed.