The Caveena Solutions Blog
Happy Chinese New Year! May we all receive blessings of happiness, health & prosperity in the coming new year!
This year I decided to decorate the old website with something festive for the occasion. You’ve got your regular red lanterns and oranges but this being the Year of the Horse I thought I’d do something… different.
Well, what else did you expect when you crossed a horse and a bird? Because if it ain’t a Pegasus I’d love to know what it is.
Icon Design
OK, let’s deal with the elephant, erm Pony, in the room: the icon is based on Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. With that out of the way, let’s talk about the design of the icon itself.
First of all, being an icon I wanted a clean, simple design. If you’ve seen any pictures from the show (or ahem watch it on occasion) you’ll notice the art style is very clean which makes it not only suitable for icons but also relatively easy to render in vector format. Look no further than DeviantArt for proof.
At the same time, I knew I had to maintain the shape of a horse. No point celebrating The Year of the Horse without the horse. That’d be like going on honeymoon without enjoying some honey *wink wink*. My first choice was to use Fluttershy but her silhouette just did not work: I found her long hair ruined the horse outline I was going for. Rainbow Dash on the other hand has shorter hair which simplified the entire process.
Finally, the wings had to come through clearly enough. I mean, it’s a link to Twitter for crying out loud so this horse had to fly! Fortunately, there are many instances of Rainbow Dash flying that I could use as a base for the icon and we eventually ended up with this:
It took less time than I thought to flatten the look of this website. I know we’re a bit late to the party but I really thought it was going to take longer than it did. All I had to do was comment out the CSS3 gradients, remove some borders, straighten out the rounded corners and substitute a font or two. Thank goodness for LESS, I say.
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A while back I updated this website and switched out some of the png files with their svg equivalent. What I forgot to do was render the fonts in my logo as paths before uploading the svg file.
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When rolling out a News Section on a WordPress website, would it be better to use a Custom Post Type?
A friendly reminder to please resize your images before including them on your website. Needlessly large images will slow down your website irking visitors and upsetting your Google web search ranking.
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