Posted on August 29, 2006 in Blogging, with 0 comments.

Last Night’s Meatloaf

So after recalling all the HTML I knew, and struggling mightily with the CSS, the site was up and running. My girlfriend was proud, and we told all our friends. Hey, it was even valid xhtml. Not bad for an old dog.

So now it was time to dig in and start what I had come to do: create my own personal site.

But what to call it? I wanted something catchy, something original, and maybe something about web design. After looking though a ton of other web design blogs I realized every clever design name was taken (Design Junkie was a big disappointment). So I opted for the name: Last Night’s Meatloaf.

It was a term I came up with on some drunken video-game escapade, and at the time it was utter genius (usage: “we’re tearing through these guys like last night’s meatloaf!”). It sounded clever, memorable, and most importantly the domain wasn’t taken yet. Perfect.

I spent a bit of time messing around some more in Paint Shop Pro (PSP), when I decided a silhouette of my city’s skyline would make a good starting point.

Heres a diagram of what I ended up coming up with:

I outlined a photo I found at Google images with a vector pen, and also drew up some more rays, this time a bit fatter and looking a little more like spotlights in the distance.

After tooling around with the two vector images I had something concrete and attractive.

I found a cool font, Derringer played around with the gradient fills and the gradient transparency. I also extracted a few decorative elements from somewhere, I forget now, and put them in the corner, for added depth. It looked ok, but it was still missing something:

Days passed, and scraps of paper filled up my desk, when I realized the answer was right in front of me all along. It was missing the meatloaf !

The next day I spent the entire time at work sketching out concepts of meatloaf. It seemed weird a first, and I got a few odd looks from passers-by but since I just wanted a simple outline of a fork holding a slice of meatloaf, it wasn’t too dificult at all.

I scanned it into PSP and used the same tracing technique that I used on the skyline to get a good scalable vector outline of a fork and meatloaf. To fit the meatloaf into the header image, I added an arch to the shape. I messed around with a few more gradients, added a few lighter bits to the meatloaf (that’s how I remember mine looking anyway) and the logo was done. It was simple, easy to recognize, and memorable. Pretty much exactly what I wanted.

At this point I think I had spent about a month or two on the header image and the logo themselves and I was more than ready to actually layout the rest of the site.

I decided on a dark gray background, it would bring out the color in the title, and the header image, really make it stand out. The content areas would be white, and the footer would be similar to the header, only inverted, and without any details (just the blue/white rays).

And then, all at once, it was finished…

...and I hated it.

It was unfortunate, I felt like Ihad done a lot of quality work. The transparent gradient in the title was cool, and the logo was definitely original and good, but it just lacked an overall feel. It’s hard to describe, but looking at the final layout, it just didn’t feel like my website.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time designing websites (or anything else for that matter) reaches this point sometime. It was harrowing and heartbreaking. For about a week, I just looked at the design, added nothing to it, took nothing away, and just tried to convice myself that it was a good design. It didn’t work.

So it would be back to the drawing board. But I needed something else. For some reason I got the feeling that I had done all I could do in Paint Shop Pro, and so, swallowing hard, I saved a bit of money and the next design became my very first introduction to Photoshop.

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