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Precious Love
11 October 2008 – 5 November 2008
This layout took about two hours to create in Photoshop. The photo is of my boyfriend, James, and me, at a Chinese garden. We took the picture using the timer capture on the camera. The font used in the site name is Jheri Curls. The layout is called Precious Love, a song by one of my favourite singers James Morrison. I liked this layout in the beginning but my skills weren’t very good at all at this time, and all I really did was arrange a lot of brushes all over an image.
Only The Lonely Know
5 November 2008 – 17 December 2008
This layout is based on the song Downtown Song by Anberlin. The photo of me and my boyfriend was taken by my best friend Lilian. Resources from Moargh and Skyline Illusions. I really liked this layout and how the purple broke up the black and grey. Purple is one of my favourite colours. I tried to create a nostalgic mood with this layout although the lyrics didn’t quite fit. I loved this layout though, and will definitely miss it.
Time and Confusion
17 December 2008 – 24 December 2008
This layout is based on the song Time and Confusion by Anberlin. Around this time I was really getting into their music! Photos were taken by my brother Brandon and my best friend Lilian. I tried a different style with this layout, a graphic in the corner and the sidebar on the left instead. The reason I changed the layout after just one week was because the colours were too drab and the layout didn’t work well in Internet Explorer. I liked this layout as it was different, but I got bored of it easily.
Daisies For James
24 December 2008 – 2 February 2009
This layout uses a photo of daisies from Freefoto. I used the fonts Angelina and Loved By The King. I think this made it look tacky and I really just wanted an excuse to use the lovely fonts. The layout title was derived from a magazine with a section on ‘How to write a Liam Gallagher song’. The layout is dedicated to my sweetie James.
Let There Be Love
2 February 2009 – 17 February 2009
Mainly to celebrate Valentines Day, this is a layout I drew myself entirely in Paint. It’s a derivation of a layout I made for one of my old sites in 2006 and I have recycled this image multiple times since then. I designed the cube characters myself. This layout was an attempt at many colours and I think it worked well but I grew tired of it easily. I particularly liked the CSS.
Autumn
17 February 2009 – 7 March 2009
I spent a lot of time on this layout. I tried a more textured layout with a lot of textured and coloured overlays. It really suited the Autumn weather. Most of the pictures are my own. I used the font Lackey for the title. I liked this layout and the elements but I didn’t like the colours and the random way things were put together. It was more like an ‘experiment’ layout. I really admire people who can create layouts with so many brushes and textures and have it still looking amazing.
Pop Tart
7 March 2009 – 27 March 2009
I drew this in Photoshop with the brush tool. It had a lot of colours and I started the sidebar from the top of the page rather than under the header. I think there were too many colours in the end, though. This is one of my only layouts with a dark background. I hand-drew the titles myself in PhotoShop as well. I didn’t know what to call it so I just called it ‘Pop Tart’, from the song Try by The Smashing Pumpkins.
Memory
27 March 2009 – 11 April 2009
This layout is a derivation of an old layout I made for my previous site. I don’t think this one turned out that great. I tried to make it different by placing the image on the side. That resulted in no sidebar, so all that stuff had to go in the footer. The layout featured photos of me and my boyfriend and best friend, arranged in a ‘scrapbooky’ feel. I didn’t like the layout after some time because of all the photos. It seemed really cramped.
Man’s Best Friend
11 April 2009 – 19 May 2009
People always questioned me about the dogs in the layout. They aren’t mine; they belonged to a lady I met in the city. She didn’t mind me taking a photo. I used a gradient (preset in Photoshop) for this layout – and picked the colours from that. Fonts used are SDKwangSoo and Georgia with some brushes from Swimchick. I liked this layout a lot. The navigation took a while but I am very proud of it.
Rose
19 May 2009 – 14 June 2009
This layout was intended to be up for only a short amount of time; the previous layout had been up for too long. I tried something different in this layout to include the lyrics to Anberlin’s song “Retrace” in the background. The rose was a photograph I took myself, of a rose in my own garden. I used Windsong and Segoe Script for the fonts. The colours were chosen from the image; I quite like the way the layout turned out because it uses quite warm colours instead of the grey I use a lot.
Without You
14 June 2009 – 1 August 2009
This layout features, again, a picture of me and James. This time a smaller photograph is the focus. This layout was my first WordPress theme as well. I absolutely love the way it turned out – the colours, the style, everything. I used the fonts Angelina and Jellyka Saint Andrew’s Queen. I attempted a less noticeable effect with some text in the background. The outline of the heart wasn’t perfect, which is probably the only thing I didn’t like.
Stay With Me Tonight
1 August 2009 – 4 September 2009
I chose the brown and blue colour combination because it’s rarely used, and I remember James telling me it gave the impression of muddy jeans. I used a photo of snow, that I took, as the underlay for the layout; it’s barely noticeable. The fonts I used are Violation and Book Antiqua. I used quite a few brushes in this layout. I used erasers in the shape of brushes to create certain effects. This turned out as a horizontal-background layout, which I think worked pretty well for my first one.
With A Little Help From My Friends
4 September 2009 – 20 September 2009
I was inspired to make a scrapbook-like layout using my own pictures, and used pictures of my friends and me. I doodled parts of the header image in Photoshop and used the font Pointy for the text. I had trouble finding a suitable background so I used a woodgrain one. What I liked in this layout was the links, which were quite unique. I didn’t really like this layout very much.
Life Is…
20 September 2009 – 29 October 2009
The inspiration for this layout came from the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The quote in the header reads, “Life is paradoxically coincidental to the ironical tyranny applicable to the unparalleled definition of reverse entropy” and makes reference to the book series.
This layout’s original idea was to have a completely black-and-white futuristic layout including the quote in computerised Courier font, however I scrapped that idea for something brighter. The colours balanced out the greys. I loved the affiliate links in this layout and the sidebar elements. 
R&R
29 October 2009 – 13 December 2009
The inspiration for this layout came from examples of typography I saw online, and the song R&R by the Classic Crime. The quote that the header consists of is “what we would give to feel alive”. I attempted to use a number of different colours in this layout and make it rather bold. I am very proud of this layout. It wasn’t anything hugely fancy; it was just bold and striking. The use of several shapes and colours were probably the highlights, as well as the shadowed divs.
One Day Son, This Will All Be Yours
13 December 2009 – 26th January 2010
I wanted to try a more elegant style of typography and that is what resulted in this layout. The words in this layout are from songs and albums by the band Fightstar. I was inspired by a typography piece I saw on the internet, which mixed a small number of fonts together. It was so much more intricately done than mine, but I decided to make mine a lot simpler, since it was part of a whole website and I wanted to tone it down a little. I was so unsure of the amount of greys on the layout, and how to work it with a simple tone of red – but I love the way this layout turned out, and how I “went back to my roots” in a different way. 
The Way Out Is Broken
26th January 2010 – 16th April 2010
This layout was inspired by my favourite band, Armor For Sleep. Following their break up late in 2009, I decided to create a layout including a few of their lyrics. However, a few turned into a lot, displayed across the whole of the layout. I loved this layout very much although I had a lot of trouble creating it with so many layers and clipping masks, and had done so much editing that I couldn’t ‘undo’ a lot of things. For most of the layout I used my own images but used quite a number of brushes both in the header and in the footer. I attempted to make this layout “amazing” and recreate my second Heartdrops layout in a way, but I couldn’t weave a large picture of James and I in it – therefore there is just a small one. I am extremely proud of this layout and miss it – what I love most are the colours, and the collage-style.
Sweet Desire
16th April 2010 – 1st June 2010
I created this layout on a whim. I had taken a lot of pictures of a cupcake that my friend Ryan bought for me. It was really cute! I just messed around in Photoshop with different styles and came out with this layout. I decided to cease using the TTF Titles plugin for this layout, so the titles were less fancy but jazzed up with background images. I was trying to create a layout similar to that on my fanlisting collective Eyethief.com. I had a bit of trouble with the colours on this layout, and I know it isn’t quite “amazing” or “revolutionary” but I was really going for the simplicity.
Water Music / Requiem
1st June 2010 – 27th August 2010
This layout was very simple and just consisted of a header image of a photograph, and use of CSS3 to include one of my favourite fonts, Gisha. I opted for a different colour scheme to what I usually choose, which included some rather muted colours. I took the photograph for the header image myself. This layout was inspired by a layout I made for my old portfolio.
Love is…
27th August 2010 – 18th February 2011
This is probably the best layout I’ve ever made. It was made for the ‘Love is…’ project. I had the idea to create a layout with rotating images or quotes. I chose quotes, and somehow came up with this! The quote in the top of the layout changes when the page is refreshed or when a new page is visited (unless the rotation loads up the same quote by chance). I used a bit of CSS3 in this layout for the titles, and I like the bold look and the use of white. I haven’t used white in quite a long time.
There Is Nowhere Left To Go
18th February 2011 – 11th July 2011
This layout was inspired by my favourite musician Ben Jorgensen and his solo EP There Is Nowhere Left To Go. I went to his show in January 2011 and took the photo in the layout. I used a few brushes and textures to jazz up the image. I tend not to create dark layouts but I think I pulled this off well. Random quotes are featured in the footer and this is the first layout I’ve used here that has a dynamic sidebar. I definitely spent a lot of time on the details.
Coffee and TV
11th July 2011 – 9th October 2011
I thought this layout was amazing but the more I looked at it, the more easily I got bored. This was my first fluid layout on Heartdrops. It was inspired by the song Coffee and TV by Blur. Initially I had been playing with colour schemes and liked how a generally brown layout looked nice with hints of different colours when used right. I drew the little milk carton once the rest of the layout was complete; I didn’t intend for him to be there in the first place.
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