Welcome to my (New) Little Stage!

Hi!

My name is Sydney and I'm pursuing the New Media Certificate. After taking Writing for the World Wide Web and Digital Storytelling, I had a lot of fun exploring what I could create online. I'm hoping to get a better understanding of web development so I can make better stories! ...And maybe use my new skills for a personal project ;)

Project 1: I Love Otters

And here’s my first project: my loving tribute to all things otters! Honestly, I just wanted an excuse to look at otter pictures, but I’m really proud of what I’ve done! I think the colors I used for the background of each section go well with the background picture I used and it was a lot of fun messing with fonts and seeing what looks best. But because of how many pictures I used and that giant table on my second page, things took a lot longer than I thought. I’m used to things like Wordpress where you can add a bunch of images into a gallery with little effort. Coding everything by hand made me appreciate all the work that goes into doing something on your own.

Project 2: Watch Me Ramble About My OCs Three Separate Times

Yeah, just like how Project 1 was my excuse to ramble about otters, Project 2 was my excuse to ramble about my characters. I'll be real, this idea came about as a joke, since this group is actually a cult. I thought it would be funny if someone made a website for them, and then whoops, the joke idea was what I went with! I am glad that I chose that topic though since it made working on this project a lot more enjoyable, even as I struggled to wrap my head around Bootstrap. I think my favorite part was choosing the color scheme for Panel Three. Coolors has a function where you can generate a color palette based on a picture, so I sent my header through it and got a lovely mix of blues and purples!

Project 3: I Swear, I'm Not Addicted To Macarons

That's a lie I totally am addicted to them and I wanted to talk about them. I actually switched what I was going to make my sites about two separate times. The first time, I wanted to have a store for candy in general, but I was getting bored with it, so I switched to just cotton candy. But then I started to lose steam on that and switched to macarons, since they're treats that I absolutely love. I didn't forget that cotton candy idea entirely though, as it's part of the reason why I focused on pink as a major color in my commerce site. I'm already pretty familiar with Wordpress, but I had never made a shop with it, so that was fun for me! I feel like I could've experimented more with plugins and widgets, but I still enjoyed using the block editor and trying to find fun things to do with them. I'm also glad that I finally know how to change the CSS of my themes, as I've been wanting to customize my main site for a while, but didn't know how. I'll be sure to take what I've learned to my portfolio!

Final Project: My Monster (Affectionate)

Alrighty, buckle up, this one’s gonna be a doozy.

So, last semester, my final project for my digital storytelling class was a Twine story called Spectrum. In it, you control a little shadow creature named Luca who has to travel the world and charge a Prism with light to stop the world from literally crumbling apart. Throughout the story, Luca becomes more aware of your presence, and depending on what you do, they either go along with your actions or try to rebel. I liked to call it my monster because it was a massive project.

Well, guess what? Yeah, the monster is back.

I’ve had the idea of making a webcomic for ages, but it wasn’t until Spectrum that I seriously began to consider it. It very much does not exist yet, though I have a decent outline and I’ve started on some scripts and thumbnails for the first chapter. But what I really wanted to do was have a site dedicated to my comic. Places like Webtoon and Tapas are great, but I wanted the ability to customize the platform Spectrum would be hosted on and display information about the world and characters.

Enter ComicPress and its buddy Comic Easel!

ComicPress is a theme designed to host webcomics, while Comic Easel is a plugin that allows for the easy posting of those comics. While you can use Comic Easel with other themes, ComicPress was built for it, so that’s what I went with. It’s great! It lets you use buttons to navigate between pages easily.

I just hated how it looked by default.

Because of the whole shadow vs. light theme Spectrum has, I wanted the color scheme of the site to consist of black and rainbow colors. I created a background image using the colors from the Spectrum logo and kept the main content area black so it was easier to see the good stuff. I can’t get enough of the effect here!

I also made good use of patterns, especially for the archive and cast pages. I used columns to format everything how I wanted to, and then I saved them as patterns so I could reuse them at any time. I made sure to not sync changes to the patterns as well so each one can have unique information. This will make adding new pages, chapters, and characters much easier as I won’t have to remake the columns every single time I want to add something.

I also made use of another plugin, PublishPress Revisions. This lets you schedule edits to already published posts and pages. Since my archives won’t automatically update when a new page is posted, I can instead schedule a new comic page and an update to the archives to go live at the same time. That way, new pages will always show up on the archives the moment the comic is updated.

Furthermore, I decided to add a few more fun aesthetic changes, like adding rainbow borders around the cover blocks and menu.

I wanted to do this to make these sections pop out against the dark black and to go along with the background image. I used a linear gradient for this, and I think it turned out very well!

I also decided to tinker around with the fonts with one more plugin: Google Fonts Typography. With it, I was able to easily go in and change the fonts I was using without ever touching my custom CSS. This made changing fonts a lot easier!

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this project! Spectrum is very special to me and I can’t wait to actually use it once the comic properly starts. I’m already wondering what I could do to make this site even better. Exciting stuff!