Crys Odenkirk

Seelund’s Winning Entry to the Cataclysm Beta Guild Contest

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Crys

Blizzard had an essay contest to select guilds to participate in the Cataclysm Beta. Rules were, guild leaders only, less that 250 words, tell them why our guild deserves a spot in the beta. Simple enough.

And my essay won! Here’s what I sent:

We bring a lot to the table. We number several professional interface developers and system engineers with stress testing and QA experience. We’re committed to giving the new systems a serious shakedown. We can promise that our bug reports will have the kind of information the developers need to reproduce and diagnose the problems. I can personally promise you a professional user interface evaluation from a fresh non-Blizzard perspective.

But mostly? I want to do something awesome for the best guildmates a person could ever hope to be blessed with. My guild’s members make me more than I am. They’re the kind of family you can’t be born into and few ever find. I could wax poetic about the several families who joined to play together, or the fact that some of us have been guildmates for nearly five years. I would put my life or my honor on the line for any one of them. Every single day, they find a new way to amaze me. I can never give back as much as they give me. Compared to that, the coveted Beta key is barely a blip on the radar.

Help me give them the kind of reward they deserve for being the most inspiring people I’ve ever known. In return, you’ll get the most useful and broad beta testing, from a full range of computer familiarity and ages, that you could hope to get from any of the guilds who’ve entered.

Color Wheels with only CSS3 and Primary Colors

Posted on July 11, 2010 by Crys

There are no images above, nothing but css (half of it vendor propriety, sadly), and this was entirely created with primary colors: Red Yellow and Blue. Why? Because I wanted to see how well you could create other colors using additive color mixing methods like you would with paint through overlayed rgba semi-transparent colors. A standard color wheel with secondary and tertiary colors was the obvious test. This works in Firefox, webkit browsers and even, yes, Internet Explorer. Well, the curved edge that makes it a circle doesn’t work in IE. But the semi-transparent color overlays to simulate additive color mixing that I was wondering about? Works like a charm! Continue reading →

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Milwaukee City Hall

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Crys

Milwaukee’s City Hall On A Stormy Day

Digital manipulation based on a photo I took of Milwaukee’s City Hall in Sept. 2009. I used the same original image as the basis for my Photoshop tutorial on Vignetting/Depth of Field with Smart Objects CS4/CS5

Vignetting/Depth of Field with Smart Objects CS4/CS5

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Crys

Here’s my original image:

Now, assume for a moment I wanted to focus attention strictly on the tower, up around the clock, to show off some of the great architectural detail on the Milwaukee City Hall. One way to do this is to blur out the rest of the picture (called a “depth of field” effect). The masking adjustment and edge refining controls that were added in CS4 make this damn simple. Continue reading →

“Essential” Template Style in 16 colors

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Crys

Template style "Essential"

Give users a new style for their website

Myers Internet offered templated sites for real estate agents and mortgage brokers across the country. I created a new style of templates, named “Essential”. Each template came in 16 colors; blue is shown here. Along with all the graphics and html/css for each color for the template, each style included 14 image headers and 4 flash headers per color.

Not pictured here is the template Minimal, which was created after Essential. Below is a mockup for the template I was working on when they closed Myers.