[Please Note: This is merely a mockup presented as a design example. None of the internal links function. Please click here to return to Chaotic Blue]

(See the original opening splash page for this design)

This particular design was the first that the chaoticblue.com domain ever had. CB was created as a move away from the more anime fanwork-y type things I had been doing with 1/World (my previous webspace, which is now defunct; you can find out more reasons why by clicking on the link). Chaoticblue (named after an undescribed demon lord from Hajime Kanzaka's Slayers universe. It sounded cool. Before you decry me, be fair. If all the domain names for designers that took them because they "sounded cool" were taken away, the 'net would be half empty.

The design's pretty simplistic. For some unforseen reason I focused on graphics this time around rather than layout, and thus even I am forced to admit the HTML itself was a bit lacking (it broke down in a number of somewhat spectacular fashions). I'm glad to be rid of it. But it's still a fairly good design overall. My philosophy of graphics is usually to focus on what can be easily done with what's available and free; in this instance, I snagged a number of useful plugins from Flaming Pear.

This design heralded my move away from Netscape 4.* and IE 4.* browsers. I had just begun using Mozilla and found it much nicer in terms of standards compliance. Netscape 4 has a lot of problems. A LOT of problems. After stalling the design of this page for months (literally) in order to fix small, sometimes 1 pixel wide-niggling problems with NS4-compliant design, I gave up. At this point, I realized that I was selling my layout and graphics skills, not my to-the-letter perfect HTML (though I pride myself on writing clean and efficient code as well as layout).

Random factoid: The subname "Lunatic High" is from Final Fantasy 7; it refers to one of Red XIII's little-used limit breaks.