Paksworld

My artist friend Jen handed over the digital version of the title block design for the Paksworld website and I got to play with coloring  inside the lines.  Jen worked from my very crude design, done with a rollerball pen on graph paper, and made it beautiful.

The challenge was to find a design that would scale up and down and still evoke the complexity of the world I’m writing in.   We started over a month ago (before Jen was called in) and I started showing sketches to my web designer.   This produced a series of encounters  that went roughly like this:

Me: “See this?  Isn’t it gorgeous?  I want something like *this* bit right here, but mixed with this other thing over there.”

Webguru:  “Do you have any idea how many pixels that takes?”

Me: “But it looks good–”

Webguru: “But it won’t when it’s reduced to the size that will fit on the monitor–all these little curlicue things will lose pixels and you’ll have white spots–and what color did you want?”

Me: (blithely) “Oh, I was going to sort of paint it, you know, make it all brilliant colors and shading and…”

Webguru:  (sound of headdesk) “Remember what I told you about *scalability???*”

Me:  (sullenly)  Well…all right.   Let me think…oh, look, how about this…and then I could add these little bits–they’re not as ornate as those others–”

Webguru:  (voice beginning to show strain) “Remember about the number of pixels?  Scaling up and down?”

Me: “Well, yes, but…”

Etc.

It’s not yet finished (which *shade* of gold should this bit be?  The blog “gold” is greener than the “gold” I was playing with earlier–do we want a cooler or warmer overall design?   Is the green too dark/light?  Should this part of the design be metallic?  Raised?  Etc.)  but we’re closing in and the new title block should be done realsoonnow.

It will have colors–nice strong vibrant colors but not ones that scream at you.   (In other words, no turquoise/orange, or hot pink/orange/sulfur yellow combinations.)   It will have a border.   The hints of Italianate foliage are gone but the hints of Viking are still there, especially in the corner blocks.      (Personally, I was hoping to combine  design elements that picked up on all the cultures involved, but that might be just a tad ambitious even if the problem of vectors and scaling and so on weren’t involved…)   Eventually, the site will also have some incidental artwork that doesn’t need to be scalable, but that’s down the road.

I’ll tell you (I’ll be jumping up and down going “Lookit!  Lookit!”)  when the new design’s up and live.