Artwork Usage

Overview

When I first set out to create this page back in the hinterlands of 1999, I laid the whole thing out in MS Word 2000 and saved it as a web page. While it looked great in IE, it looked like $h!t in everything else. The reason for this is that Word introduced a whole lot of MS only crap into the HTML code, so if I wanted to do this thing right I was going to have to do it myself. I started out by teaching myself basic HTML using a combination of various tools- HTML 3.0 Programming for Netscape from a MCSE class I took years ago and various web sites. I have moved on to newer forms of HTML, specifically (X)HTML using the books (X)HTML for the World Wide Web, 6th Edition by Elizabeth Castro, DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition by Jason Crawford Teague and the website W3 Schools, a set of online tutorials for HTML, (X)HTML, XML and more. After several years I can now more than muddle through pretty well.

As I explained in the former paragraph, this site was designed in 1999 and, well, looks like it. I have only updated the HTML and brought it up to HTML 4.01 compliance. I am really trying to get it looking more like a modern page and hope to do so by the time that look is only a couple of years out of date.

Backgrounds:

The backgrounds were simple enough; they were gradient tint backgrounds I created in Word that were automatically converted to a simple JPEG file when I saved the pages as HTML. Infact I still use Word to create new backgrounds as need as I expand the site.

Bullets:

The bullets I used in Word were in fact a custom font that Microsoft has specifically for Office, and to replicate them required about five lines of code for each instance they were used, or about 500-600 extra lines. The easiest way to recreate them was to make new ones, which I did in Paint (arrow.gif and ones that start with star** in the tables below) and define them in a Cascaded Style Sheet. The CSS is at http://www.brown-home.com/saab.css if you want to look at it.

Icons:

I wanted to use some fancier bullets at the beginning of the various headings, so I set out to find clipart to use in that function. I eventually came upon the IconBAZZAR web page and found several bullets and arrows that I could use, unfortunately they did not have all styles I wanted. Specifically they were missing an "UP" & "DOWN" style arrow to go with their "LEFT" & "RIGHT" arrows and only had the "four-square" style diamond that I used at the head of each page. I looked at the arrows and bullets and decide to create my own in the same style. The result of that two month-long labor is the various GIFs that you see througout the bottom section of this this page.

Photos:

All photographs used on the site are, unless otherwise noted, were taken by me and are subject to copyright. Any photograph on this site that was not taken by me will be credited to the owner and/or photographer. If you see any images on the site that are yours and wish to discuss my usage of the, please contact me here.

Album Covers:

The artwork & album covers used on this site belong to the various music artists', their music company and/or the original design artists. If you want to listen to these albums, buy them. The RIAA is composed of a bunch of asses and you don't want to have them on yours.

IconBAZAAR

The following eighteen (18) icons are taken from the IconBAZAAR web site:

17dot1b.gif	17dot2b.gif	17dot3b.gif	17dot4b.gif	17dot5b.gif	17dot6b.gif
13dot1b.gif	13dot2b.gif	13dot3b.gif	13dot4b.gif	13dot5b.gif	13dot6b.gif
12dot1b.gif	12dot2b.gif	12dot3b.gif	12dot4b.gif	12dot5b.gif	12dot6b.gif