project in detail

From u/TheCacajuate

My daughter's winter break got kind of blown up in 2022 due to some really broken weather patterns and Southwest Airlines' inability to cope with them, so we spent a lot more time at home than we expected. As it sometimes does, that resulted in a couple projects leveraging our big stash of...

As I've now done for the last fifteen years, I've recently completed another alteration of the logo for my long-running website, Caves of Narshe, to celebrate the site's 25th anniversary. This one, while not altering the form nearly as much as the prior change for the 20th, takes the basic format of the current logo and does something very different with it to stand out from the site's long history. A Change of Direction While the site has not visually changed significantly overall in the last ten years, the site logo had taken some significant turns. When the overall site design was last...

Continuing from the previous Project in Detail blog , the first part of the new CoN logo's creation.

Specialization

As mentioned, the genesis of the logo update was the desire to make another special version of the logo to celebrate the site's 20th anniversary. Very few sites, particularly hobby sites, can claim to have survived so long, and I wanted to do something special to commemorate the time spent in development and among the community. Conceptualizing the new, sleek iteration. The...

This is the first "Project in Detail" blog I've done about something that wasn't either explicitly web code, or heavily web code with some design enhancement along the way. This time around, I'm documenting the process involved in revamping the logo for Caves of Narshe to celebrate the site's 20th anniversary (on July 31, 2017).

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What you missed in part one was mostly me explaining that I like old video games and I've lived a lot of places. Full steam ahead into part two!

The Design In Practice To make this idea work, I needed to establish the requirements for the design, just as if it were a fully-scoped project. I needed the design to...

I hadn't done a whole lot with my eponymous website in a decade; not as if the thing gets a boatload of traffic, but as someone who makes his living and has his major hobbies all connected to the web, it was a bit awkward to have something quite so stale. In the time since the site was last refreshed, I've learned a great deal about design and development, changed my focus personally and professionally, and lived in a great many varied places, and that's something I wanted to reflect in my own personal webspace. Hence, this new alvies.org site.

The Design Impetus...

I've been a soccer player for the vast majority of my life, but my path to being a soccer fan was a slower one. That's something for some other blog, probably. But over at the Caves of Narshe, still my primary online community, there have been over the years a lot of folks who have been soccer fans just like me, and a fair amount of banter around the Beautiful Game, as they say.

There's actually more crossover between...

As most of the web development for the Caves of Narshe is a one-man operation, I admit that the site can be slow to adapt to trends. Most recently, that trend has been responsive web, which is particularly annoying given that the site's core competency, video game information and walkthroughs, lends itself extremely well to use on a mobile device. Most games now are played with the user either on the mobile device itself, or with the phone or tablet sitting next to them as they play from the couch. A hard-to-use UX for mobile makes the site itself less attractive to players, which...

The "Arkeg" is, as you might be able to suss out if you think long enough, a combination of a stand-up arcade game cabinet plus a "kegerator," another portmanteau describing a mini-fridge with a small keg of beer inside. This is, in fact, a real thing, and it's one that...