I didn't know where to start, but I had this idea of text, on a floor, in empty space. I also had in mind, a clean, white feel to the blog, with subtle colours, to give an overall smoky feel to the blog. Early iterations of the banner proved that this would be a difficult task.

as you can see, while the background is completely white, the overall portrayal is still, very, very dark. Other post-stage effects applied to this render was a depth of field effect, in my desperate attempt to blur out the horizon, and bring the text into focus. So, as you can see, the horizon is completely burred out.

I ended up with a semi-cartoon style, which worked surprisingly well, and I liked it quite alot. I figured the cartoonish style would do the blog's name a little justice, in terms of comic value. And hey, I could do with a less-than-formal blog for all my graphics work. welcome2thesocial is formal enough as it is.

I spent of of the time on the second iteration, which I eventually dumped:

I kept the blue text, for some reason. And, in hopes of a cleaner, less heavier looking banner, I got rid of the ugly depth of field. Together with this, was a bit of a professional look to it, which I did by making the text reflect off some of the light. Which is why the "OSHT" part of the text is a little brighter.

I also made the floor ignore most of the lighting, but instead, left it to light itself up. The result was a mostly flat & ugly-looking banner, and perhaps the only thing that worked out, was the light reflecting off the text. The floor was dull, and just so flat. I spent so much time working on this, and got nothing. I knew this wouldn't work out, and so, I started over from scratch.

and so, we ended up here, iteration 3:

It was luck, that led me to figure out that a green floor was kinda cool. The nice thing about this iteration was, even though it was completely black, it didn't come across as dark at all. A second light to the scene helped illuminate the floor nicely, and helped give appropriate highlight to the text. The back of the text was lighted up, and as you can see, the text, although it doesn't reflect light, it has a certain shininess to it. This shininess, yours truly, the second light in the scene. It helped light up the darker portions of the text, most evident in the letter "O" and "S", where the top of the text is brighter than most parts of the text. This second light is brighter than the light that lights up the front face of the text.

These two lights cast two corresponsing shadows on the floor, as you can see from the render. As a last minute thing, I threw in a volume light fog effect, which gives the light's path a fog effect. The result was a unindented over-the-top spotlight effect, but I was happy with what I saw.

The floor's horizon is barely noticeable. It's there, but the way everything just clicked, I didn't even notice the first time I saw my render. This entire thing took me around 4 hours.

The blogskin desgin, was another story. The blogOSHT banner fit right into the top of the page. From the very start, my vision for this blog, was just plain posts. Nothing else. No tagboard, no music, no hit counter, just posts about my GFX works. BlogOSHT, is afterall, what will serve me as my portfolio.

So, I was stuck with another dark theme for my second blog. welcome2thesocial already had a dark theme to it, and worse, it has no color. It was easy to work with, but in that sense, it's a lackluster. blogOSHT's banner forced me to further incorporate the blue and green colors into the blogskin, and with some experiments, I did.

this blogskin is blessed, in a sense that it only uses new-gen code. welcome2thesocial has some ugly bits in it, because the original skin for that blog was formatted using tables (ew). I got Jing Wen and Geok Shan to help me with that blogskin, and soon, it was a mix and mash of new-and-old, containing an odd mix of CSS and HTML tables working together.

blogOSHT is blessed with the capabilities of CSS, and as such, I was able to place exactly where, on the skin, I wanted my posts to appear. I could also give the title of the blog post a blue background color, and the date, green. Surrounding the post is a border, yours truly, CSS coding. This blogskin is the result of me experimenting around with new-gen web coding, such as CSS. With stuff like these, i'm able to do more with less.

below the last post of every page, is a rather ingenious integration of links to previous posts. I didn't want any sidebars, etc etc on this blog, so I just added it after the last post. The "Previous Posts" box looks similar to regular blogposts, but actually, it isn't. That's the ingenious bit.

and there you have it. blogOSHT's design process.