About:
This layout features Chii from Chobits. CLAMP, the creators of Chobits, has such beautiful artwork. I haven't come across one of their stories yet that I didn't enjoy the drawings. :) Making this layout was especially fun! Right away I wanted to use blue since I hadn't done it before in any of the other versions of Anime Zenith's guild website. Finding the picture was the hard part. Finally, I came across a site that had a ton of Chobits pics. What luck!!

Basically, I selected the image using a feathered border so the edges blended seamlessly to the background color. Once that was done, I realized that blue was the perfect color to use because it looked like part of the sky. The clouds around Chii didn't look as cut out as they would have if I used a different background color. The pixilated effect near Chii's feet is a really nice touch too. I think it looks really neat and well placed. The font below that is sort of a child's cursive script. Since Chii acts naive and innocent most of the time, I think the font brought out those qualities of her.

I pieced the entire layout together in Paint Shop. Once I created the content and link boxes, I began to cut out pieces that would form the individual frames. Creating frames can be tricky, but I happened to take extra care in writing down each picture's dimensions, thus making the difficult relatively easy. In fact, I created the skeleton framework of the index page completely before I even peeked at the progress, and I had it nearly perfect. Usually, one or two things are wrong resulting in an appearance nothing like what I was going for.

Notice I said "nearly perfect" in my sentence above. There was something slightly wrong in the very top frame. The top of Chii's head (frame #1) and the upper border of the content box weren't using the margin: 0; attribute in my style sheet. The height of the pic happened to be 9 pixels, which through numerous trials and errors, I found needed to be at least 11 pixels before no margin would appear. This threw things off slightly but once I discovered the problem, it was fairly easy to fix. Afterwards, everything else was a piece of the proverbial cake!

One problem that had to be addressed was the background of the content box. Since the border around it was black and the ledge Chii was sitting on was black, naturally the two blended together to the point where you couldn't tell one from the other. So when dealing with the background, I simply lightened the entire rectangle up. That made the black ledge gray and looked really weird as if it was in front of everything else...not quite the desired effect. So, I just left it black and lightened the rest of the picture around it. ^-^

The addition of the "Part of" box is cool! It's actually a link back to my domain, where all my websites are listed. The Kenshin button was the only blue one I have so it matched the most. I have a Sakura one also (another CLAMP story) but that one is red and would stand out too much. Kenshin is perfect, neh?

All in all, I really like this layout. It's probably my second favorite out of all the versions of Anime Zenith's guild website! The quality of all the images is perfect, and that's thanks to the frames. I feared that I would have to scale the quality down if it was one large picture and that might degrade the borders around the content area. Luckily, I didn't have to do that and it makes a huge difference!