This layout is kinda a bridge between two different points of my designing era on groups. Before this I had spent quite awhile working in a very simply, yet detailed, style. This style was generally white or grey in nature. Through 8 previous layouts create had pretty much stuck to this style with very few deviations, especially the 3-4 layouts directly before this one. After this point however, I started to branch out more, and while this wasn’t really the defining layout that caused me to do so, it was one of them. To this day I’m still really happy with this one, I think it’s a pretty nice design, it’s well organized, it has nice pattern work and the fonts look nice. All in all I probably should have kept this one around a little longer before moving on to version ten and eleven, which were less well received.

Ah the first redesign of Create, which happened probably a good 3 months or so into it’s life, which was about the norm for a redesign for the site, every few months or so. This version was a big shift from the original design, but still somewhat minimal. As I recall I went through about three concept designs before I ended up with this one, I picked a few things from each of them and together they kinda fused into the final layout (I still have the concept designs, I will upload them at some point). Looking back I’m very fond of the content area of this layout, it was the first time I had done avatars this way, something that would be a staple of my layouts for about 6 months. It also blends very well, perhaps a little more color would have been nice. Also I’m still very disappointed with the upper area and banner for this layout, as I recall I had a lot of trouble fitting something into the design and it shows, I wish I would have spent more time on it and perhaps version 3 would have been vastly different then what it ended up being.

I promised before when I posted my Beauty Inside submission that I would later post some of the other things I did with it. The most notable is this layout for Synthetic Art. At the time this was probably my boldest attempt at leaving MSN Groups for a true .com. SynArt was a step along with many of my pals from create to get out there (this happening right after our group Createv2 was hacked and taken over). Overall it really did ok, a lot of the members from MSN Groups followed us to the forums at SynArt and all in all while we were there it was a good time. However, work in the .com was hard and while I had previous experience this was the first time I was really trying to do more than I understood. I spent a lot of hours during this time playing around with php code snippets, installing software, etc and it allowed me to build up enough skill that later on down the road I would be able to build dbzrenewedfaith.com and then after the closing of MSN Groups my crowning achievement CPN. Stylistically it’s a pretty simple layout, but very clean, it would go on to be used again for Pokemon Concept.

My long in development, probably never to be completed Final Fantasy VIII RPG known simply as Annihilation. This layout had a LONG journey to get to this point, it actually started as a much smaller MSN Groups layout for my DBZ RPG, Renewed Faith. It never got used for RF because reformatting all the content was not a task we wanted to take. After that I had reworked it for a follow up to my Chrono Trigger RPG, but again I didn’t end up going there. Finally it came to use for FF8A. I was fast at work on the layout and RPG on MSN Groups before it closed and the project went into hiatus again finally to be fully revived on Dystopia Productions. What you are viewing here was the probably 60% complete player profile page, it was mostly working as it should but I was unable to finish the mechanics to do everything before I abandoned the project. This is the building blocks for what will be the Chimera Engine.

When Dragon Quest VIII came out on the PS2 I was blown away with how great the game really was and it wasn’t long before I decided that I wanted to bring that atmosphere and overall feeling to a forum based RPG. This came about at the end of the MSN Groups era and I decided that I wanted to make the most detailed RPG that I could make, something that would blow every other RPG out of the water. Although this project ended up stalling when MSN Groups was announced to be closing and I only ever finished eight full pages of content I to this day believe each of those pages, including this one, are among my very best ever. Hopefully one day I’ll manage to make my way back to Dragon Quest VIII and finish the project for everyone to enjoy.

Ah good old Cyberpunk Nexus, the biggest, more daring thing I ever did online. For those of you who are unaware of what CPN was, here’s a small history lesson. In 2008 MSN announced that their Groups service would be closing. For many of us, me included, MSN Groups had been a home where we hosted our RPGs. With Groups out of the picture we were going to have to find a new home. I thought it would be a good idea to build that home myself. CPN ended up being a 2 year venture and for a good while a very successful one. This layout was launched with the site and served as our theme for the first year before all the true work was done to automate everything and which came with a new design. In the end this is probably my most detailed and best done layout. There are many versions and so much work into it, more than a screenshot can capture, that’s for sure.