About Page.

Production Process:

Before I could begin thinking about the layout, I had to think of a story. The story was going to be the foundation, for my assignment. Having no ideas what to write about, I began browsing the web. Whilst looking at Fray.com, I came across a story, which entailed of medieval battles, and love stories. This was to be the inspiration for my story, although my end story is completely re-written and different, it was based upon work by another artist John Lasne at Fray.com.

The title of my story was the Stone Princess. Since the story revolved around a fictional medieval story, this became my theme. When thinking about the medieval times, an image of a scroll came to mind. Again after browsing the web, I came across the type of scroll I wanted, fortunately for me, the creator had left his email address, where he could be contacted. In which I did asking if I could use his scroll image for an assignment. Quite surprisingly I received a reply saying he would be happy for me to use it as long as he was credited. This I thought was a fair agreement, and was within the rules set by the assignment brief.

Also to make sure I had not just stolen the image of the internet, I imported the image into Macromedia Fireworks as I am familiar with this software package, used the marquee tool to go around the scroll, making it an movable object, then used the embossed effect to make the image stand out. Within the HTML, I created a div, where the image would sit, used CSS to point to the image, as well as positioning it in the middle of page. Next I created another div, which was where the story would lie, and with the help of CSS, and z-indexs positioned it on top of the scroll.

In addition to this, I was thinking about typography. Typography is the use of text to create a desired effect and when thinking about my theme, the thing that instantly came into my mind, was that in the olden days, the first letter was printed larger. So with a series of CSS class's, and increased font size, I created the look. Afterwards came what fonts to use, to keep with the style of my assignment, I wanted an old style font that would look as if it had been done with a quill pen. The fonts I originally decided on, for this effect were;
Old English Text MT for the first letter
Lucida Calligraphy Italic for the main body of text.
However a few people had said that the Lucinda font was too hard to read, therefore I decided to change and use the font Centaur instead.

Keeping in touch with the medieval theme, I created a stamp using fireworks, reason I used fireworks was that it enabled me to create an image map, so the image could link to my penguin webspace and placed it within the HTML in a div called stamp. In addition I wanted a splash page at the beginning, so I scanned in a picture of a castle, and edited it so only the drawbridge remained. I then put the image as a template and began to use the pen tool in fireworks to trace round it, then used filter effects to make it look like a ruin, and placed a rectangular hotspot at the entrance, which would create a starting place to the story.

Only thing left to create was the navigation, as my scroll already had hyperlinks to the next, previous page, I felt I did not need a bold navigation system, so I placed the links at the bottom, and lined them up to be centered with the scroll. All the above was put together with the use of divs in HTML and positioning in CSS

Once all the main bulk of the page was done I began to read thru the brief and decided to put in some accessibility issues.

Accessibility Issues

this page has

References and credit attributions

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