Lo and behold, the new Cynical Stuff design is in place! It may not be the most artistic design ever, but I think it will serve its purpose. The purpose is of course to have a common design for all KarjaSoft pages: KarjaSoft.com, Sheeplings.com, Wildhollow.com…and later also SpandexForce.com. I’ve waited with Spandex Force since that’s the most demanding of the game pages. Demanding because there’s a lot of content there, and I’m going for a “less is more” approach with this new design.

It was surprisingly simple to convert the KarjaSoft design into a WordPress plugin. I feared that it would involve days of strange PHP coding – instead it only involved hours of strange PHP coding. I’d like to mutter some choice words about WordPress, but truth be told the more I work with it the more I like it. The themes are structured pretty logically and the default fallback works great. (I.e. if you haven’t written a special PHP file for, say, viewing a single blog entry then it makes some magical assumptions and displays the content as best as it can anyway.)

You can see the result right now: it’s a lighter, happier blog than the old black Cynical Stuff. Granted, something darker would be more appropriate for the title but it’s my bloody blog so you just shut the hell up if you’re not happy! If I want to have a shiny happy blog I’m damn well going to have it! And either way I actually prefer contrasts. Like the suicide bunnies:

Suicide bunnies rule! Or at least they will when the revolution comes.

By the way, I’ve removed the ugly “Cynical Stuff” handwriting from the logo! An era is at an end. Only yesterday I was convinced I were going to let it remain – but today I realized that it simply won’t fit in with the new design. Oh well.

Welcome to Cynical Stuff v3!

In the beginning of the summer I posted an ad where I asked for web designers interested in having a go at integrating all the KarjaSoft pages into one logical unit. Essentially, what I want is a unified presence in order to explore synergies between my different projects – e.g. Cynical Stuff, the KarjaSoft company webpage and the different game pages. Yes, you may now slap me in the face for using both “unified presence” and “explore synergies” in the same sentence. Either way, I got a couple (as in two) responses…that somehow missed the mark a little.

What I desperately need is a designer. Not a programmer (I can code PHP myself, goddammit!) or an artist (what good is a pretty logo if it’s just sitting there like a bloated toad?) – a web designer! But somehow the word design gets lost when one mentions web design. Web design almost inevitably gets interpreted as either “make a logo” or “do a customized content management system.” Design is of course present in both making a logo and writing code, but my needs were for a person more keen on usability and design in the classical sense.

To make a short story long: In the end I sighed and shook my blonde curls in dismay, and decided to have a go at it myself instead. Hey, at least it’s a learning experience, right? Here’s what I ended up with as my first concept:

This is supposed to be the Games page; a list of all KarjaSoft games with easily accessible links to each game. Clicking a game logo leads you to the specific game’s page. The color scheme and the logo is modified for each game, but the main design is kept in order to give a sense of unity. Also, the navigation buttons in the top right are present on all pages. As you can see I’ve used common terms instead of titles. If someone sees a button with Cynical Stuff it is probably hard to guess that it leads to this blog, but by typing out Blog everyone will instantly know where it leads.

And yes. If I adopt this design, it will mean that Cynical Stuff will be redesigned according to this as well. As long as I can make a decent WordPress template out of it, that is.

Any thoughts? Does it look like cat vomit? Does it look okay?