new look again

Sunday, July 20, 2003, at 05:57PM

By Eric Richardson

What is it about Sundays? My last look was posted on Sunday, March 9. It lasted four months and eleven days, though I did tweak it in the middle. This new look comes from my desire to get back to something white-based, and also really wanting some more room for the body area. The picture is current, so yes, all my hair is gone. Eventually I want to make the nav bar links drop-downs, but that's too much for me to tackle today.

The images were done in GIMP, though there isn't anything fancy going on. The picture is actually two pictures taken via a crappy 640x480 video in from a capture card. The picture was vertical, so that's how it fills the 600 pixel left bar. In GIMP I spun them and exported them as ppm, and then ran them through ppm3d (ancient tool that I think comes with netpbm). You may recognize the effect from /looks/. I used it in 8.0. Anyway, I imported the result image into GIMP, cropped it to 100x600, built my basic look (left and top bars), and added a drop-shadow on the left bar. The e is red, and the layer is set to difference, I think.

In the end, the left bar and the logo text are the only graphics, and they total 17k (and could be smaller). Most of the top gray bar is done via css, as are the nav tabs.