A.Blog » webdesign

New portfolio site up

Amy — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:50:42 +0000

Visit the site.
Oye, this is another revamp that took awhile. It was necessary though. I’ll be applying to some summer internships pretty soon and I’ll need a portfolio to show potential employers. The revamp of my portfolio at amycheng.info was also a bit tedious because I’m not using a CMS, so I had to code every individual page. It was tough decision but in the end I decided to code single pages, so I could implement some fancy jQuery features easier, like overlays and tabs. In addition, I wanted the option to embed flash, java, or whatever objects may pop up in future projects. I just haven’t found the right CMS that fulfills all these needs¹).

maybe I’ll create my own CMS once I learn PHP, MySQL

New Year, New Blog Design

Amy — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 01:19:33 +0000

It’s actually a coincidence that I finished coding up the theme in time for the New Year. I’ve been meaning to re-design A.Blog for awhile, but with applying to grad school, preparing to go to grad school, and going to grad school, A.Blog got pushed aside¹.

It’s actually my winter break, no homework = time for personal projects. Though, I don’t remember it taking this long to work on the previous design, which I called Sporty Redd.

This theme is called Rainbow Kicks, though now that I think about it, it should’ve been called CYMK Kicks.

Things I added to this iteration of A.Blog:

Asides aka a mini-blog at the bottom of the main page
An actual blog roll on the About page
A Miscellany section for random pages and mini-sites
More feed options.

for example, I’ve barely posted monthly to this thing

BECAUSE I CAN: Customizing my MySpace

Amy — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:45:55 +0000

I decided to redesign my MySpace because the last layout was getting too “AzN pRiNcEsS” and girly. This is actually the third time I’v tackled the the jungle of code that is MySpace. First time was for work, and second time was that Asian princess layout. The previous layout is on the left and the new one is on the right.

Everybody knows that I consider MySpace to be the ghetto of social websites but I’ve got to admit that it is useful to keep in touch with bands and with the 1% of the internet population that aren’t on Facebook. Out of the 25 friends I have, only 2 of them are actual people I’ve met and the rest are bands.

Unfortunately, MySpace feels that iit can do whatever it want and ignore best practices and common sense. For example, it took me ten minutes (which is forever in Internet time) to figure out how to change my profile pic because of the dumb user interface. Sometimes I’m tempted to do a redesign of the MySpace user interface but what would the point be? Anyway, I don’t want the people behind MySpace to steal my work.

[CAUTION: DESIGN SNOBBERY] Also, MySpace allows users to break best practices for design. For most cases you don’t break the grid or else the layout looks messy but I’ve seen alot of people post 500 px wide pics in columns meant to hold only 300 px wide of content.

Sometimes you can get away with posting content wider than the column, if you don’t make it obvious that the columns on the page are columns. Alas, MySpace uses TABLES to house content. Tables that are like two levels deep, which leads to confusing CSS, which in turn scares away the people that can make MySpace elegant and beautiful. Anyway, tables are a bit tricky to style and alot of people won’t take the time to understand how CSS applies to the TR and TD tags.

AND another thing, would it be so hard to restrict the width of the actual site? Not everyone had a screen that is a million pixels wide. An easy thing to do, would be to automatically resize images larger than a designated size. This would also alleviate broken grids found on many people’s pages.

Friday Night Coding Party

Amy — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:34:36 +0000

By party I mean, alone, staring at the computer screen, editing CSS tags and figuring out the WordPress PHP call functions.

So, I finally finished the new design, and I’m pretty happy with it. I wish I didn’t have to resort to 3-level deep nested DIV layers and a forced footer height, but it works. It looks pretty decent in IE and Firefox (surprisingly IE likes the sticky footers better than Firefox). I’m hoping it looks alright in Safari.

Portfolio Site Redesign

Amy — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:28:50 +0000

Also, last weekend, I redesigned my portfolio site. I had spent hours on another concept but threw that one out because it wasn’t working. Besides I think this design is more hip and cool. And look, gradients! Check it out here.
The grid layout isn’t that much different from the old site though it’s much tighter now because I made the thumbnails uniform. I got rid of the gray overlay that was part of Lightbox because it wasn’t working in Internet Explorer, no matter what I did, so it was simpler to just get rid of it. I also added the movie site I did and the gaming blog to the web section.

Blog Redesign Version 4.0

Amy — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 23:06:01 +0000

So I’m redesigning my blog for the fourth time (well fifth if you consider the flower theme I was working on but decided to not make to the public). Right now I’m using the Plain Jane theme made by someone else as a placeholder theme. It’s simple and chic but it not mine.
I’m doing things a little bit differently this time. Like I’m mocking every page up in Photoshop (using the handy Layer Comps feature) and then producing them in CSS. I don’t think coding the designs would be very hard but it might be slower this time around because I want to write some frameworks while I’m coding this design. Here are more comps: