My weird new theme image
Original Pixel theme background image
The theme ive been using (and still a using) is one I downloaded called ‘pixeled’ Its a great and tidy theme but its look is largely made up by the big background jpg image – very nice using lots of transparency and layers. So I replaced it with a Chinese Dragon type jpg of my own that I made in art rage 2 with my horrible cheap graphics tablet. It kinda broke all the web rules as there were no straight lines and its all a bit scratchy.. itwas a pretty rough setch – but other cool looking WP sites use the same trick – the amazing webdesigner wall is basically a very plain template that is filled to the brim with beautiful background images. If you have the web developer add on for firefox go to webdesigner wall and choose images/hide images from the web designer toolbar to reveal that the actual theme has no real graphical design at all leaving the designer space to add all the cool stuff 
– if you are using firefox hold your mouse pointer over a background image, right click and choose ‘view background image’ to have a look at the jpeg/gif/png image on its own.
Hand drawn Art Rage 2 background image
I love webdesigner wall I like the way it uses photoshop to merge hand drawn art with vector based graphics and all sorts of other goodness – now all i need to do is get a copy of photoshop thats less then 10 years old and figure out how to drive it and use its slicing features – oh and learn how to draw aswell!
webdesignerwall has an excellent tutorial here that i intend to go through when I have some free time.
Anyway sanity prevailed and I realised the dragon image was not suitable so I fired up my ancient copy of photoshop 6 and made something less offensive. When I have more time I want to learn more about photoshop/fireworks slicing. I also intend to build my own wordpress theme from scratch. But for now my blog is a concoction of crimson gradients and yin yan symbols…..
Tags: art rage 2, themes
One advantage of the original theme image is that it isnt very specific about the placing of the header and tool bar links. You can resize the window and the links will still appear to be in the right place. The problem with the image ive created is that ive used purple blocks to highlight the links – so if the browser is resized any smaller than 1024 in width they lose their alignement. On a flat html page (or if id built the theme myself) I could over come that with CSS.. ah well it stays for now..