To accompany the publication of my most recent Neocities page, I thought it might be worthwhile to include a blog detailing some of the decisions made during its design. I'm fairly new to website creation, but it's quickly becoming one of my favorite creative outlets. Unfortunately, my ideas far outstretch the time I have to accomplish them.
If you haven't seen it yet, the page in question is a “quiz results” page focused primarily on political quizzes, The Political Compass, for example. When considering the page, I had envisioned taking a quiz in school on loose-leaf paper. I figured I could throw the page together in a day or two. A day or two turned into ten as I kept thinking of things to add.
In addition to using loose-leaf paper as a container for my content, I decided to model the page after my desk in my upstairs office. My first Neocities page was largely created through digital collage using images I found through Google and Bing image searches with a healthy amount of pet pictures. This time, however, nearly all of the images used were pictures taken of knickknacks that litter my office. Even the loose-leaf paper is a picture taken of an actual page I ripped from a notebook sitting on my desk. The background behind it is a snapshot of my desk, which I built myself a few years back using a butcherblock countertop. What I created is an approximation of my actual desk, with quite a lot of artistic liberty thrown in the mix. Below are some detailed discussions of the different elements that compose this page.
Font:
Nearly every aspect of this page is an original production, including the font. With the loose-leaf paper as my container, I wanted a font that appeared handwritten. At first, I considered just downloading a premade font just as I had on my previous page, but the thought of making my own font entered my head and wouldn't leave. Upon Googling the idea, I found a service called Calligraphr that lets you do just that. All I had to do was print out and fill in a template, upload it to the website, and voilà, I now had a font designed off my real handwriting (though, I can't say I write nearly as neatly as it appears on the page). The whole process was really quite simple, only requiring a small amount of tweaking to finalize.
Mug:
One of the first graphics to grace the page was the oddly shaped mug placed near the top of the page, filled with pencils, pens, and brushes. It's difficult to make out with the top-down perspective, but the handle of the mug is actually a heavily endowed woman. The mug is one of my favorite thrift shop finds. I picked it up a few years ago in Fredericksburg, VA at a shop called “R & R Antiques” for $15. Upon researching it, it's the creation of a potter named Jim Rumph from the 70s called the “Girl Handed Tankard.” If you're interested in learning more, this website is a trove of details regarding Rumph's work: Rumph Collector. I would love to add more of his pieces to my collection. I'm especially enamored with his King Kong tankard.
Doodles:
All of the doodles on the page were drawn in Procreate on my IPad Mini using the 6B Pencil brush in gray (hex code: #444444) to mimic real graphite. I'm fairly new to digital drawing, I've barely had the iPad for a month, but I found the process to be quite addictive. I'm not much of an artist, hence the preference for digital collage. I haven't drawn anything meaningful since late middle school/early high school. Consequently, I created most of the doodles by tracing and shading over an image (the exception being the text in the logo that reads, “Quiz Results”). The Bubbles doodle was the first one I created. I was so pleased with it that I may have gotten a bit carried away. You may have noticed that even the mouse pointer is a doodle.
The most significant, and I hope, eye-catching doodle is the animated skeleton near the top of the page. Originally, my intention was to just draw a doodle of a Smilodon fatalis skull (my favorite extinct species) in the corner of the page. That turned into a 10-hour process of creating a digital collage, tracing it, shading over it, and finally animating it using the distort feature in Procreate. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, even if it significantly increased the time I poured into this fairly unimportant page. Oh, and if you're a fan of the game Demon Souls, you may recognize the helmet the skeleton is wearing.
Hoverable elements:
There are 8 images included on the page that are hoverable, meaning that they change when moused over. One of the images, I'll let you find it yourself, acts as a return link to my home page. I encourage you to play around with the page. While it may primarily exist to contain political quiz results and my somewhat radical musings, most of the work that went into the page was just out of a desire to create something fun. I hope I accomplished that.
Ishmael:
You may notice a book titled Ishmael by Daniel Quinn near the middle left of the page. The climate crisis has been a primary concern of mine since 2021. Prior to that time, I was aware it was a problem, but completely unaware of how serious a problem it poses in the relatively near future. This year, I read Ishmael for the first time, and I find it to be a remarkable book. I won't say it taught me anything I didn't already know about the climate crisis and its causes, but the narrative it provides places all our problems into a perspective that's hard not to see in nearly every aspect of our modern world. To put it bluntly, Quinn asserts that humanity is at war with the planet. I find that hard to argue with.
I mention the book here to address its inclusion on a page that appears to celebrate my identity through consumerism. I'm not oblivious to this. Like many Millennials, I grew up being conditioned to be a consumer. I am still a consumer and collector, though I have reduced what I buy in recent years in reaction to this knowledge. I've even found a focus on creating art (woodcarvings, paintings, bracelets, even this website) provide a similar, if not longer lasting, dopamine hit than what I once enjoyed at the arrival of along awaited package. Nevertheless, it is important to note that nearly every aspect of modern society contributes to the climate crisis and its many adjacent crises. Individuals, while complicit, are not at fault. These are crises of production. So long as the capitalists continue to ignore our problems and double down on producing garbage, the sell of which lines their pockets, we will continue to experience the decline of our planet's life support systems. This is not a crisis that can be solved by individual action alone. Focusing on individuals is merely a distraction from those truly at fault.
I hope you've enjoyed this blog post and my new page as much as I've enjoyed creating them. If you have any questions that I neglected to answer in this post, feel free to ask in my guestbook or via Neocities' activity feed. I'm always happy to share information with fellow hobbyists.