New Blog Design

Just put up a new design today. I was messing around with Adobe Illustrator (my first time) and learned the power of brushes.

I made a fun background image and decided it was time to mess with my old blog design. Basically I just made a big background, set it to be fixed, then added opacity to a few of my divs.

I did the whole thing only touching my css file which made testing a breeze. To go live I uploaded one image and overwrote my css file and presto! I am not sure I am sold on the opacity. The newness of it may fade away and take with it the fun. That said it is at least something new for me to play with.

What I really wanted was for the BG of the elements to have opacity, but not the content of the elements. However that isn't how it works. I tried a few different ways but the containers seem to inherit the properties in a way that I can't get around. Maybe if I used a semi transparent png? That is a test for another day.

Update: I did go the path of the opacity in PNG files. I made a white box, 90% opacity and use that for my white transparent areas. I left the top ares using CSS opacity for now as I need to pick colors etc. The downside to this is that it wont work in IE6 without some JS.  But frankly I am NOT designing my blog for IE6 any more.  UPGRADE NOW.