Building My Django Weblog: Part 5

The time came for me to start thinking about where to host my site. And although I have some experience with using dreamhost to host sites, I wasn't particularly thrilled with that idea. Instead, I started thinking about using a VPS. That would allow me to use gentoo linux as my hosting environment, and it meant that I wouldn't have to hack around and do clever things just to run django behind apache and mod_python. Added to that, regular hosting is about 10 US dollars a month, while a VPS is about 20 a month. I decided to go with VPS Land because they offered the best price point for the feature list. And they've proved to be an excellent provider in all the time I'd been with them. (I switched out to linode simply because a friend of mine is there, and I have to represent and keep it real).

Anyway, after upgrading gentoo and installing django on my VPS it was time to start opening up the testing to other people to get their feedback on various features. One of those features was the look of the site. Since I'd already decided on a layout, it was time to play with colour schemes and logos. One of the first schemes i tried was an off-black (#333) on off-white situation. That worked quite well, but it was rather boring.

At around the same time, I wanted to come up with a logo. Several months prior I contacted a couple of people on IRC and in real life, and nobody really had the time to help me come up with a logo for my website. So, now, I was about to launch a private beta of the website to friends, and I really wanted some sort of a logo.

Now, I'm not an artist at all. I've drawn maybe three things in my life that have been any good. All three have been faces, and all three were given away to people. The first was Alyssa Milano's face, when I was 14. The second was a warrior dude with face paint when I was 16, and the last was Johnny Depp when I was 19. What can I say, faces strike me.

Anyway, in the early '90s then, I discovered CorelDraw on the 386. I didn't get what it was about initially, because all the computer drawing programmes till then were the blocky type MS paint stuff. This vector drawing thing was definitely different. So I started off with drawing the Superman logo. And that looked great, so I moved on to the Batman logo, which is a little more curvy. From there, I went on with drawing a comic book character (Storm, of the X-Men). Like my drawings, I don't have any of those either -- the Zip disk got lost somewhere along the way.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, Grant told me about inkscape, a vector drawing programme for linux. Ah, the memories of the CorelDraw experience came flooding back, and I was instantly comfortable with inkscape. I've used it a couple of times since to do some piddly little projects.

Coming back to the main story, the first thing I did was write the word "Kulleen" in several different fonts to see what appealed to me. It turned out that six, in particular, looked good to me: AlfredDrake, CuneiFont, Caligula, Dobkin, Engraver, and Park Avenue. Particularly, I was looking at the capitalised "K" in all of the fonts. So, I saved the file with all 6 samples in it and went off to bed. As I was falling asleep, in my head I started playing around with the letters in my name. So, mentally, I'm rotating the K around and I realise that all the letters in "Kulleen" really are just rotations of each other.

The next night, I tried this idea out. I liked the AlfredDrake "K" the best, so I took it and rotated it a few times:

This wasn't bad for the logo at all. The little crescent moon thing in the K really helped a lot for the letters "E" as you can see. So I decided to dispense with the base of the K and thus was born the initial logo:

I showed that to my friend Adam at work, and he liked it, but thought that it would be more effective if some of the letters were squeezed this way or that to improve readability. And that's how I wound up with the logo you see at the top of the page. Kudos to James Rowe for actually figuring out the logo -- he's the only one that I know of who's done that. And now, it's too late to claim it, because it's revealed.

I was able to turn my attention back to the colour scheme for the site. I wasn't really struck by anything I saw out there, but I did get an idea from someone's blog (the name and link escape me), where they showed how a colour scheme was picked from a photograph. That gave me an idea. I like red and blue and black and white anyway, so I thought I'd check out some movie posters of the movie "Superman Returns" -- et voila, there was my colour scheme. The Superman suit's colours from the movie became my red and blue. It looked a little stark on a white page, so I lightened the effect by sampling his skin colour in the poster (the yellow from the "S" logo didn't actually work anywhere for me).

And so there you have it, that's how I came upon the look of the site. I'm still exploring various layout options, though. I'm pondering pushing the main navigation menu up to the top instead of the left bar. In the meantime, though I'm working on content-types and document validation, so I'll talk about that in the next article.