Guess what, motherfuckers ...?

mallorymaloney.com's new layout has finally been released! O_O

That's right, everyone, after Version Thirty Eight being up for nearly a year and a half, I'm extremely proud to present Version Thirty Nine at last! ^o^ As you can see, it features loads of my favourites: Bats, stars, stripes, checkered patterns, and of course, an abundance of purple and black! ^_~

Before anyone beats me to it, I'd just like to state that I do realise the purple and black diagonal striped background isn't exactly easy on the eyes. In fact, one might even go so far as to classify it as 'retina burning'. >_>;

However, you must understand that before I did try other, more eyeball friendly background variations ... But none of the other backgrounds seemed to pull the whole look together as well as the purple and black stripes did, so in the end, I decided to just go with 'em. x_o;

After all, beauty is pain ... And beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ^_~

I was saying earlier, though, this layout is very 'me'! ^^; It features a bunch of my favourite shapes, patterns, and colours, plus, nearly every image based aspect you see I created myself from scratch!

Take the font I used for all of the larger text based images, for example --- It's named Mallory Maloney's Handwriting, ((Available on the Original Fonts page for download,)) And I created it myself with the help of FontCapture.Com a few months ago!

Now, if I could pause the layout presentation for just a mo', I have something I'd like to mention about FontCapture.Com. If you're a regular visitor to mallorymaloney.com, I'm sure you'll remember me raving over how amazing the font creating site was when I first discovered it. As I wrote in the 2 December 2009 entry:

... Imagine my absolute delight when I stumbled across the magnificent FontCapture.Com, a site that allows you to create your own handwriting font via an automated service. All you do is print out a template, fill it in character by character, scan and upload the template, and after a short wait while it converts the scanned image, you've got the link to download the finished TTF file.

But the best part is that your completed font is completely free of motherfucking charge! O_O Seriously, you don't have to pay a single fucking cent, and the outcome is bloody professional as Hell, in my opinion ...

Now imagine my absolute dismay when I revisited the site today, only to be automatically forwarded to YourFonts.Com, a site that provides a near identical service ... But at the price of fifteen American dollars.

... Can I get an actual what the fuck, here?! I just created a font using the same method a couple months ago for zero dollars, American or otherwise ... Why the fuck would I suddenly start handing over fifteen to do it now?!

On top of this utter bullshit, YourFonts.Com only accepts payments via PayPal --- Which means that, even if I lost my mind and decided to give these fuckers my cash to do something I could previously do for free, I wouldn't be able to ... Due to a family 'friend' scamming people on our home computer five or six years ago, resulting in my entire family being permanently blacklisted by PayPal. ((Which I already spoke about at length in the 2 December 2009 entry quoted above.))

Needless to say, I'm monstrously angry about this, as I had loads of ideas for new Original Fonts I was planning to make in the near future, and now I might not be able to use any of these ideas ... Not without forking over cash to some greedy cocksuckin' site, or learning how to work with a complicated font making program, anyway. Argh! ><;

... Let's get back to the presentation of Version Thirty Nine, though, before I go insane with rage and begin strangling every human within a twenty four thousand nine hundred and one mile radius. AKA the entire Earth's circumference. >_>;

;She jumps right back into the discussion of the new layout in an attempt to distract everyone from the condemning fact that she may soon commit mass genocide.;

Now, where was I --- Ah, that's right! I was going on about how nearly every image based aspect of Version Thirty Nine I created myself ... Including the bats you see scattered all over the place, which I drew by hand!

To be more exact, what I did was draw a single bat wing on a piece of paper, ((With my trusty black cola scented gel pens,)) As well as a little pair of pointy ears. After that, I scanned them in high resolution, opened them in PhotoShop, copied and mirrored the single bat wing, and then fused the little ears on top. Next, I used the same technique I use on some of my PhotoShop Brushes to ensure they don't look too hand drawn, ((Mostly adjusting the Contrast to +100 two or three times,)) And then this single high res bat 'base' was ready to be edited any way I pleased! ^^

The tiny bat bullets you see scattered about were a completely different process, though. Even though they seem quite small and insignificant in comparison to everything else, they were quite the challenge to create!

The first step involved searching for a more 'realistic' bat silhouette on Google Images, and then shrinking the silhouette considerably, until it was only about twenty pixels wide. ((In case you're wondering why I didn't simply use my own bat base instead of searching on Google Images, this is because my own unrealistic, cartoonish silhouette didn't look anything like a bat at all when it was shrunk to such a minuscule size. x_X))

After the shrinkage came the hard part --- Turning a virtually shapeless, blurry JPG into a clean edged pixel bullet. I managed, but it definitely took loads of experiments ... Not to mention patience! I believe I agonised over the two or three different designs of tiny bat bullets for a full day or two before I finally made a decision of which one to use. @_@;

Another small yet stellar aspect of Version Thirty Nine would definitely have to be the matching Link Back banner.

I worked on that baby for nearly three days, and it went through four or five completely different design changes before I finally decided on the image you see above! ((Don't even get me started on how many ideas I had for animating the text on the banner. #_#))

Ironically, though, the smallest aspect of all, pixel wise, is probably one of the most noticeable. Of course I'm talking about the fact that, for the very first time, mallorymaloney.com is now sporting a FavIcon!

Coming in at only 16 x 16 pixels, this tiny fucker was another design challenge, and as you can predict by this point, it went through three or four vastly different changes. In the end, though, I decided to just keep it simple and go with a plain black star --- Which is identical to the stars used on the background of the blockquotes, the textareas, the 'Okay. Search!' button, and segments of the header image.

As you can tell, I'm quite obsessed with making sure that things 'match' and 'make sense' one hundred percent, and because of this, I simply couldn't bring myself to use any of the other, more interesting FavIcon designs.

Not the one which featured a mini purple checkered background behind a 3D star with rounded points, (('Where else does this layout feature stars with rounded points?')) Not the FavIcon featuring a 3D lowercase 'm', (('If the name of my site simply had to be condensed into acronym form, it wouldn't be a single lowercase 'm'. It'd be two lowercase 'm's, a dot, and then an uppercase 'C', 'O', and an 'M',')) And definitely not the FavIcon of a bat with just the tips of its wings cut off. (('What the eff. This makes my site look like some sort of online wing clipping headquarters, and I don't even agree with wing clipping.')) So the highly boring yet perfectly matching and sense making plain black star it was. e_e;

All in all, I believe the only thing I didn't create myself was Minimal5, the pixel font used in the header and footer ... And even then, I spent days upon days searching for one that was absolutely perfect! My criteria was simple enough: As small as possible while still being easy to read, nothing too fancy or rounded to take away from Mallory Maloney's Handwriting, and nothing too boxy or futuristic, which simply wouldn't match.

For some reason, though, there are pretty much no pixel fonts out there that follow all of said criteria --- In fact, the only two I know of are Silkscreen, ((Which I couldn't use, considering it had already been featured in Version Thirty Eight,)) And the recently discovered Minimal5, which I finally stumbled across by luck on this guy's DeviantArt.

So if you, too, are looking for the 'perfect' pixel font, then I suggest you click here and grab yourself a copy of Minimal5 before something happens to it ... 'Cause it's not available for download anywhere else online!

And I do believe that just about covers Version Thirty Nine's presentation, so all that's left is for you guys to lemme know what you think about it ... So FFS, stop dicking around and get commenting already! O_O