This is the rough first pass on the knotwork I’m currently working on: the threads are plotted out and space left for illustrations. I’m not entirely positive what images I’ll use in the windows. Brighid and Lugh perhaps, though I didn’t weave any devotions into this one so I might go with something simpler. I may subdivide some of these threads as well, particularly around the windows.
As a programmer myself, I understand how frustrating it can be to receive a bug report that lacks enough delineation of conditions to recreate the error. I prefer to over-document than under, and I will sift through as much of the code as I have access to, and do additional use tests, to isolate specific causes.
I first participated in a beta test as part of a school program back in the 90s with Adobe Photoshop, and Aldus Pagemaker (before it was bought out by Adobe). Since then, I’ve been involved with quality testing and bug reporting from alpha stages (with Myers Internet, Alladin Plastics, and other sites I worked on) through bug submission for production code. Most recently, I was involved with the closed guild beta test for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm as a guild leader, and the later stages of both Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic betas. NDA agreements preclude listing examples of specific bug reports.
I’ve got two main forms of amusement: coding and gaming. So it’s probably no surprise that most of my best online work gets poured into my WoW/SWTOR guild, Seelund Trading Co. I’m pretty happy with how the site looks and functions, but I’m always looking for new ways to make the site more useful and draw people to it.
My next big project is a combination module that has two parts: an event module, and user-generated character profile/information pages. Because I want to let people post events as their characters, which I can’t do without actually having characters already set up as entities, I decided to start with just the character pages half. This series will walk through my design and development steps as I build the module.
All of my major projects start as pages in a letter-sized legal pad. I’ve got these babies littering my dining room, my library, and scattered across the table I work at. I keep a rainbow collection of gel pens handy to match my mood and when I get an idea I’ll snatch one up and go sit in a corner or at a table trying to get the idea down on paper before it’s gone. Continue reading
This is the website for my World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic guild, Seelund Trading Co. The base site is built on phpbb3 with the index and information pages maintained in the cms MX-Publisher (whose website seems to have vanished as of this posting. Guess it’s a good thing I can update and change the programming as I need to myself). I have made substantial programming changes to my copy of MX, including changing the way news posts (posts in the forums that are designated as “Announcements”) are sorted so that the one that expires soonest rises to the top of the front page.
The biggest amount of work I’ve done on the site though is the custom theme. The current design is the second — the first included only World of Warcraft imagery back when we were a WoW-only guild. I used the default phpbb theme as a foundation and then rewrote the better part of it so that it would properly reflow on a smaller screen or with non-default font sizes. The images are all manipulated/cutout screenshots I took from the two games.
As part of both designs for the site, I created logos for the guild, which are used in promotional items such as videos and recruitment posts:
February 2010
Future improvements planned for the theme include a mobile-specific version and having the characters at the top randomly chosen from a pool of images of the current members of the guild on load. Current programming projects in progress on the site include a section for user-controlled character profiles and an event calendar that users can post to as their characters (watch the blog for project updates).
I created this chart to show the relationships between the different crew skills in Star Wars: The Old Republic for my guildmates and for fellow players in other online communities. Users are given a list of all skills and allowed to pick three, but with no in-game explanation as to how they relate to each other or what they are used for.
The background is a screenshot from the game and the icons are game assets; I am responsible for the rest of the graphics and treatments in the chart. I chose to use colors to denote relationships for a quick visual cue, using a gradient for items that had more than one relationship. Headings are in Baumans to keep consistent with other TOR collateral I’ve produced for our guild. Created in InDesign. PDF Version Available.
