Cascade, and my games Blind and Paint Cannon - all these ideas and nothing to do with em’

I made a pretty huge change to the siteshell today that I think ads a lot more fun and flair to the UI than was present before.  As you’ve likely noticed (if you’re reading this on Desktop), gone are the pop-up word lists that used to appear when you moused over a main menu item.  I loved they way they animated but they confused the hell out of everyone I’ve showed my site to.  Everyone (rightfully) assumed the extra text were links to other sections of the website.  This resulted in disappointment when they would disappear whenever someone tried to navigate with them.  This, paired with the fact that I couldn’t come up with any words for the “About” menu, I had to replace em.

So, what do we have now instead? How about A BUNCH OF COLORFUL AS HELL ICONS?! Yay!!! Icons!  I think these represent the links better than any pop-up list of words ever could have, plus the animations fit more with everything else on the site. In addition to these new animations, I’m also starting to add transitions back to the home screen so site navigation won’t be as jarring.  I’m also working on getting the assets to respond to variables, so I can make the animations cleaner (as in you don’t see the mouse-off animation of my buttons until you, well, actually mouse-off and skipping the intro when coming from the blog).Look for these and more additions soon!

Final version of the banner, just thought I’d share’

If you’re the type who visits my site frequently, you probably do not exist. You also may have noticed I haven’t changed or updated the Mobile BIE site in…roughly three years. Well, from now on, any new news posts made on the BIE Official Bog or BIE Desktop sites will get mirrored on the mobile site. Hopefully this will make the site feel more accessible, unified, and functional as a whole. I wont be getting to fleshing out Mobile’s theme section until the desktop site is fully completed but I figured this was a good way to start.

Since Mobile is built with straight up HTML, it’s a bit friendlier to do multiple news posts on there.  Thusly, I’ll leave the three most recent news posts up on mobile.

The news section now behaves like a functioning portion of the site!  Yay!

I got a little carried away/distracted with the media section and forgot to get the basics out of the way first (like a functioning home page, some designer I am!).  But you can now enjoy that tasty menu item animation when you click news (it is actually really interesting finding the right weight for those stupid text links to move with).  I’m using an animation similar to the “newest song” page so I can contain the news post in a movie clip, making it easy to update.  A link to good ol’ tumblr is also included.

More to come soon’

I had a chat with one of the DARTS professors I know (well, the only one I know really) today about my portfolio work and it got me extremely jazzed to work on the site.  It’s going to be one of the pieces I submit for my portfolio to (finally) enter the Digital Arts major at UO.  So today I got quite a bit of work done.  Here’s what’s new:

• Deleted the background bubbles by accident. Kept the change after I liked the new look better
• Fleshed out the music section more.  Original idea consisted of just pages of those disc icons.  I opted to place a couple more menus above that to give users more control over what they’re listening to.
• One of those new options, Newest Song, is a quick and easy way for anyone to listen to the most recent track I’ve produced without futzing around in the library.  It has a simple transition to make it easy to update throughout the year.
• Greyed out menu items that aren’t ready for prime-time.  This doesn’t actually deactivate them but hopefully it’ll encourage users to stick to what’s working for now.

And those are my updates! There won’t be any new material for this month since I’ll be focusing on getting my portfolio in and done on time (it’s due at the end of the month).  Work on the site will continue regardless since it IS part of the portfolio.  I’ll keep updating with major news, changes, or plans as I go along.

Peace!