A Fresh Coat Of Paint
30 Mar 2019New Look
After a week, I have started to settle on a color scheme and look. I came up with the idea of making the site look like someone’s notebook of grid paper for designing tabletop RPG campaigns. The concept was to bring down some of the slickness that Emi Tanji, Kate Irwin, and the other graphic design folks at Wizards of the Coast put into the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons books.
I made the graph paper background with Inkscape, building up several layers of translucent blue-white gradients on an orange background, then adding a grid layer, and finally a filter layer to add a little more texture. I created a new background for the stat-block with Inkscape as well, going for a mottled gray and white texture.
The color scheme is a complimentary scheme with an additional dominant color. I knew I wanted to work with a blue and orange scheme with a range of grays. And, inspired by one of my favorite shirt and hoodie combinations, I decided the orange would look good with a darker maroon or burgundy type red.
The basic five colors I am using for the site are:
Blue: #004272 Orange: #FF9800 Red: #58180D White: #EEF6F6 Gray: #80817F
The presence of that red and the use of the hex color #001E33 (a darker value of the base blue color) as the color of the main body header pushes the orange toward a yellow hue in the eye. This is cool, because it means the site reads vaguely like a primary color palette right now. There will be some longevity in this palette, and I bet I can achieve some interesting color effects with it. Not every page will look the same, depending on the proportion and layout of the colors.
I would like to take the imagery of the site further, and eventually would like to create some coffee-stain spills and texture. I would also like to create some white out sections that looked brushed on. Another effect that might be cool would be water stains that wash out the gridlines on the background.
There is also some need for working on style mockups for fleshing out the color scheme and creating novel design elements, but I want to get new fonts in next. I have earmarked a couple of Google fonts, and I will be trying those out.
Once the basic look is there, I will clean up my CSS files and write out a todo list for further style changes. It is important, though, that I don’t spend my weekends solely working on the look of the site, but adding content to it. I will be working on ReactJS and writing about what I learn here. I will also try to get in some AD&D Deities and Demigods conversions to fifth edition.