Misstuned

12th Design: Ah…まだやまないあめ

The most recent design was called Ah…まだ止まない雨. It’s a line from 太陽のナミダ by NEWS (lyrics here). This theme was up from 15 March 2008 until 11 June 2008.

Making Of

This theme is basically a remix of 雨 (10th Design), using Bluebox by Bob as a strong base. I edited and edited and edited some more until I finally had this. All the graphics were made (however cruddily) by me in Adobe Photoshop CS2. The polka-dotted background, the raindrop bullet, the comment-time-category set of pixels, the raindrops, the re-colored theme and site titles -that was all me painstakingly pixeling on a computer that’s too old to process the drawing as it happens, so ends up making straight lines between two points like in MS Paint. LOL.

Version History

This theme started out as another theme, tentatively called Robot Love. It was supposed to be for Valentine’s Day, but apparently I can’t find time to finish a Valentine’s theme edit between January and March. XD

As soon as I officially began using the theme on Mt, I began noticing tiny little mistakes, but fixed them all. Most of them were in my Japanese, lol.

11th Design: elpmiS Offbeat

The design that was up from 2 October 2007 until 26 December 2007 was called elpmiS - offBEAT edit version 2.1 “Pink for October”. This was basically a reworked and tweaked version of a theme at my old personal site called “elpmiS - 愛のうた (Ai no uta/Love song) edit”.

ElpmiS was such a great WordPress theme by Kaisa, that I just had to use it as a base theme for a new set of theme edits for my entire network. What I did with it was edited some fonts, colors, width, padding, WordPress tags, and added plugin calls, and such, so that it was a little more personalized.

I went Pink for October in October 2007, in support of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so a good portion of the theme was pink. However, you may notice there were some green headings and the text boxes were all green. That’s because Blog Action Day was on 15 October, and I wanted to show support for the environment as well as breast cancer research.

10th Design: 雨　（あめ/rain）

After Valentine’s Day 2007, I got sick of the header and super-boxy look of ラブーラブ remix -love love remix-, so I drew in pencil a forgotten umbrella in the rain, scanned it in, traced it in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet, and about an hour later I had the first version of 雨　（あめ） (ame) or rain in Japanese. The umbrella looked terrible with the water colored in, so I chopped it out and covered the whole header image in raindrops instead, and that became the final version of the header image. This theme was first used in early March 2007, and lasted way until June 2007.

The idea of rain was partially inspired by Jacky at Dubious.nu’s “Spring Showers” layout, and the other part was inspired by the change in weather from snow to rain. We had so much snow here this winter I officiallly got sick of it, so the rain was a very welcome change.

The striped background image was painstakingly made and figured out by me after making the layout at my old network, hate-culture.net. It was a real pain to get stripes to repeat correctly!

Same general type of layout - centered with divs and valid xhtml and css. I did change the places of the content, it was all in one column rather than having a column for the sidebar and content. Some of the typography changed as well, like the headers, and the navigation menu definitely changed. However, I couldn’t get the CSS on the menu to work.

This layout was a real doozy. I spent three days getting the code to work and validate and it was still not quite right, so I spent three more days tweaking it.

I really loved the look of the posts on the front page, especially the icons, which were from Dubious.nu. This is one of my all-time favorite layouts for this site.

9th Design: ラブーラブ remix -love love remix-

This is the ninth layout I made for this site! Woohoo. It was up from late January 2007 until early March 2007. Anyway, I was sick of the old layout as usual, and I had just made the CHU-LIP theme for my Journal the previous night, so why not make a new theme for the main site?

Either a brick or a spark of brilliance hit me while I was looking through the old themes for this site: “Why don’t I re-remix the LP 2 theme with my CHU-LIP theme?” I did, and ラブーラブ remix -love love remix- is the Valentine’s Day themed lovechild of those two themes. It looks like it’s Mother (CHU-LIP), but has its Father’s (LP 2) eyes (the picture of the LP player from SXC).

There is something left to be wanted with the typography (Arial for the headers and nav style), but I intend to fix that as soon as I think of a better font and size, and maybe a better non-hover color for the nav style. And maybe I should find a better font color for the footer…

I had entirely too much fun with my Wacom tablet drawing the words and hearts and music notes in Photoshop.

I also went kinda crazy with the retina-damaging hot pink. Oh well, it looks great on my laptop.

Overall, I was pretty satisfied with this theme, being both retro, music-themed, relevant holiday themed (only 21 days till Valentine’s!), and black and pink.

8th Design: Winter Sunset

The eight layout I made for Misstuned was up around January 2007, and it featured a gorgeous picture of a Winter Sunset in Canada taken by nancynator at StockX.chng.

I went for a non-blue scheme this time, since I was entirely too partial to making blue layouts. find the typography far more unique than my other themes, as well as the colors. I still need to fix the images in the sidebar titles and some of the positioning, but generally I’m happy with it.

Some of the CSS techniques were learned from studying my former hostee Alex’s CSS. I always wanted to use footer images, but couldn’t get the CSS right. Alex had a gorgeous layout with a footer image that works, so I asked her how it worked and she said to look through her code some more. I hope she didn’t use too much of Alex’s code directly. I was just so excited that it works!

7th Design: Faithfully Frozen

This design was up around December 2006, and was inspired by Hamasaki Ayumi’s new album, Secret. The track momentum struck me from day one, and when I saw the PV on Youtube, I knew I’d be using it as a layout eventually, but I thought I’d make it for my personal site. I ended up getting sick of the sixth layout and changing the domain’s layout instead.

Anyway, Faithfully Frozen is inspired by and featuring Hamasaki Ayumi in her momentum PV. The PV was really sad, and when I saved the screencaps from Ayu-Vogue, I knew I had to make something out of it. I basically took my Snowy Night layout, stuck the new header picture in and changed the typography a bit. (I am so darn lazy!)

The idea behind the name was inspired by the PV and Ayu’s lyrics. The PV seems like she died waiting there for her boyfriend to come see her. She was faithfully frozen. The words all over the layout are my interpretation of the Japanese lyrics, but changed a bit to flow better and be a bit more dramatic in English.

6th Design: Snowy Night

The Snowy Night layout was inspired by extreme want of snow, and was up around November 2006. Haha, it’s all ugly and dead outside, but still no snow.

The image is by Kelly Kaplanek @ Deviantart.

This is essentially a remix of the Rainy Day layout, but for a different type of weather. Haha, I’m so lazy.

I did improve on the Rainy Day coding, however, so hooray for me! This one is much more aesthetically pleasing.

5th Design: Rainy Day

The Rainy Day layout for Misstuned was inspired by, what else, a series of really rainy days and Hamasaki Ayumi’s song rainy day on repeat in iTunes. It was featured on this site around October 2006.

The image, this perfect image was by SagetHollen @ Deviantart. It’s my perfect idea of a rainy day. A day where you can only look out the window and sigh because it’s so ugly out. A cold, fall day that just pours rain.

I essentially busted out a really old template and redid it for this theme, sticking to ugly-ish coding techniques, not actually managing the rounded corners on a centered footer that Mari had hoped for, but getting a working theme out of it anyway.

I was happy with how the theme looks and functions, but unhappy with how long it took me to get it right. The colors seem monochrome and zen-ish to me. Nothing’s blinding, and it all fits together.

It seems generic to me, but that’s just because since that’s the type of theme I’m best at. I’m good at minimalism.

4th Design: Back in the Day

The Back in the Day layout was inspired by looking through family albums and finding pictures of my Mom when she was younger. (She was a hippie chick.) I found the images on Stock X.chng as usual, played with them in Photoshop, and out came this. This was up around August and September 2006.

It was meant to have a bit of a “back to school” and vintage feel, and I think it did that well.

3rd Design: Misstuned

The third layout, which was up around July/August 2006, was very similar to the second layout, but of course I changed the colors and added more accessibility features in the header (more links in the image map) and made the design simpler by removing the sidebar. I removed the picture of the LP player, because I wanted to go for real simplicity by having the navigation directly in the user’s face. I used the Flickr inspired colors again and added in greytones instead of the blinding green. I was much happier with this design because it possessed beauty in it’s simplicity. I intended on staying with this design for a while.

Second Design: LP 2: Remix

The (second) layout was a remix of the first layout, and was up for a few weeks in July 2006.

It features an image of a Technics LP record player from sxc.hu. The WordPress theme was entirely coded by me in notepad, and the theme images created in Adobe Photoshop CS2.

I wanted something more colorful and easier to read than the previous layout. I played with all kinds of colors, and liked several configurations, but ended up with hot pink, neon blue, and electric green. I must admit the blue and pink were partially Flickr inspired.

I was somewhat dissatisfied with the green links, but I needed to use green in the layout too.

First Design: LP

The very first design, which was up from June 2006 until early July 2006, featured an image of a Technics LP record player from sxc.hu. The WordPress theme was entirely coded by me in notepad, and the theme images created in Adobe Photoshop CS2.

The layout type was taken from an older layout of mine from my old domain. By layout type I means the rounded corners at top, centered page on any resolution, whitespace with darker backgrounds, and positioning.

With this layout, I wanted something clean and colorful for a first layout. Something very music-related. It took me a while to find the perfect image. Once I had found it, though, I knew exactly where I was going with it. The first thing I thought of was a radio, but I had already used that in the layout for /radio, so I thought and thought, and looked across the room and saw our old LP player. I liked the retro feel of a record player, but the new-ish idea of the record player that used a laser instead of a needle. I couldn’t find a good stock photo of the same exact record player that we have, but this one seemed so much more typical that I used it. The image is from Stock X.change.

I wanted to use lots of color in the html elements this time. All the colors. And I did, but mixed their order up so it would not appear as a rainbow. It’s just colorful, yet plain, and readable. I also recently fell in love with the font Century Gothic, so I used that instead of Tahoma and was very happy with the results.

The navigation in this layout was inspired by Josephine’s design at Lalaith.org. I was blown away by the simplicity and effectiveness of a span-type nav, but I do not like using spans, so I used an image map. Credit for the nav idea is entirely to her, but now her site is GONE!