I Hope This Sticks

If you’ve read my blog here before last week, and compare it to now, you probably noticed that something is very different. And I don’t mean just that I added a new post or two. In fact, every single page has changed quite a bit. I have decided to completely redesign the look of this website so that I have a more consistent presence online.

The old logo (and look)

Before this big redesign, I had been using a simple, handmade SVG of a dragon as the logo of this site, and a cropped version of just the head for my GitHub profile picture. I made it in a rather simple SVG path editor tool that I found on GitHub. After I got something I liked, I copied-and-pasted the path data into a blank text document, added the rest of the XML needed to make it display properly, and in purple, since I really liked purple when I made it. I also have a habit of giving things names (which persists to this day), so I saved the file as patrick.svg, and the name stuck. Here is Patrick the purple dragon, for one final time:

To go along with the purple of Patrick, I made the rest of the website in purple and blue and other loud colors in the name of having the maximum contrast ratio – you know, the ones that make your eyes pop when you first look at them. In hindsight it was rather ugly, but I really liked loud colors back then. I unfortunately didn’t save a screenshot of the old website, and the Internet Archive’s few captures of my site are horribly broken (the CSS didn’t get captured for some odd reason, so it’s all basically raw HTML), so I guess you’ll have to take my word for it. But hey, at least there isn’t any more loud colors permanently emblazoned on this page.

The new logo

Bear with me here, as the story of the new logo character is a tad long.

Back when I was in 10^th grade – that’s two years ago at the time I am writing this – the final assignment in my English class was to write a 800-1200 word speculative fiction story. Being the person I am, I wrote a science fiction story, and in the story, an extraterrestrial from the planet Razeine named Yazani Anura stumbles upon Earth and makes contact with a human, Stephen Starman, in a rather unconventional manner. They manage to keep the existence of aliens on the down-low and nothing unexpected happens until the Razeinan government abducts Stephen, and… well, I won’t spoil the rest of it in case I ever publish this story online and you want to read it.

I modeled the character of the extraterrestrial, Yazani, after myself in terms of personality: smart, friendly, and helpful, but at the same time socially awkward and timid. But in terms of Yazani’s appearance physically, I didn’t want to give any preconceived notions about how Yazani looked, so (to quote myself) I “deliberately left out those descriptive details so that the reader can imagine whetever they want.” But as any good writer knows, to write about a character you must first visualize the character in your mind’s eye, and I’m no exception. I resisted drawing what I was imagining, even though my classmates, my teacher, and even my parents encouraged me to. Over a year later, in August 2023, I could bear it no longer and finally set pen(cil) to paper. This is what I came up with:

For many months, this was the only drawing of Yazani that I had. That all changed though…

As you might know, I have a YouTube channel. I started uploading to the channel in December 2023, though technically the channel had existed since September 2022 because I had to create it in order to post a comment on one of my friend’s videos.

Once I actually, you know, started uploading, I figured I was going to need a channel profile picture. So I scanned the Yazani drawing, ran it through GIMP to turn it into a black-and-white bitmap, cropped out Yazani’s head, and used that. ‘Nuff said, get on with my life.

And then later this year I found myself with a sheet of paper, a pencil, and nothing else to do. And I got a wonderful idea: I would draw more of Yazani doing different things and use those pictures on my website. So that’s what I did, and this redesign is what resulted. I initially had reservations about using drawings of Yazani on my website, rather that drawings (or photographs) of myself, but at any rate Yazani is my character and has sort of evolved into my “alter ego” in a way. I even added a script to my blog that swaps out the image of Yazani in the top left for one that is relevant to what the blog post is about – check out some other blog posts, and look at which image appears.

To accompany this change I switched out the color scheme of this website. I’m not sure why I chose green, and I’m not sure why I decided to mess with any of the other CSS as well. I intended for the links to be the same color as the surrounding text, just with a blue underline, and then I found out that the CSS I used didn’t work in Safari. I haven’t the foggiest idea why it doesn’t. (EDIT 2024-08-06: this has been fixed in Safari.)

And that is the end of the story of my online presence overhaul. I fully anticipate that in the future, I will do another one of these overhauls. But I hope it won’t be anytime soon.