Imported from deviantJOURNAL

“Yup, you’re right. This update is long overdue and it’s been necessary. I’ve changed my actual status from “Graphic Designer” to “Lurker” due to the fact I don’t really submit stuff all that often and it’s more accurate to what I do around here.

Now, I’ve lost almost all inspiration and energy to design, I’m working on a forum skin project (Retronet: [link]) which essentially is going to be the last design work I do unless I get a burst of inspiration.

Otherwise, this is it for now. Enjoy my gallery, laugh at my old works, love my newest works. And don’t forget to +fav if you really like it

Before I go, I’d like to thank all those who have supported me along my design pathways. Mainly I’d like to shout out to ~web-meister and *incluye who are the two who have helped me learn new techniques and give me inspiration and critique my work along the way. Also I’ll be shouting out to the Metanet community and all my friends through Twitter and other forum boards. It’ll been a hell of a ride.

This is Chase, over and out.”

Blackboard Academic Suite, and why I hate it.

Over the past five weeks, since I begun University, I’ve had the joys of using a piece of web based software called Blackboard. What it’s designed to do is to allow a private area for students and staff to use for uploading lecture notes and assigning tests. Overall it does its job ok, but there are numerous flaws that not just myself have encountered, but others who just use it generally have had. I’ll go and list these for you.

1. The UI is horrible

Seriously, the whole UI of Blackboard generally isn’t very nice and appealing. I know it’s designed to just do its job but at least make it look partially attractive. Not just that it’s very inconsistent and each module set can have its own custom “theme” with different designs for the navigation and headers, this can add personalisation for each course but  the problem is this means that in each course everything is different. This is stupid in my eyes and can easily confuse other people. Also there’s too many text links scattered everywhere, this just makes it harder to find everything.

2. It’s prone to crashing/errors

When you’re in the middle of completing a test and all of a sudden navigation in a separate tab takes you out of the test and screws you over, you wouldn’t be very happy. Especially when it counts towards your degree. Not just that it doesn’t like IE8 and the coders don’t plan on fixing it anytime soon, which is surprising because it works fine in Opera. And considering most people use IE8 here that’s going to cause an issue generally with most users.

3. It’s frustrating to use

Yes, if you haven’t gathered here, it is very frustrating to use. It makes grabbing notes from missed lectures easier yes, but when it takes you 20 minutes to actually find what you’re looking for when it should take you 5 minutes you do get very annoyed. Generally the whole lot needs fixing, quickly. And it’s the sort of thing I’d open up Photoshop for to fix by myself as a little boredom buster.

So there you are. That’s exactly what I think of this horrible suite, but it does its job. I suppose that suffices…

Retronet, a forum skin in progress.

This is the first of serious posts on this blog. This is a forum skin that myself, and Joel Taylor are working on. Destined for Metanet Forums, this skin’s original purpose was to emulate the skin that was available before the move. When moving from Forumer.com to a private domain, we lost the unique skins we had due to changing from IPB to phpBB. Also this meant we had to recode a new skin from scratch. So that’s where this skin comes in.

So far, it’s going pretty well, with most of the main design complete. You can view the progress here if you’re interested, but otherwise it’s not too far from completion. Most of the main UI is complete, with a few more tweaks here and there that are needed.

I’m looking forward to this being implemented into the forum soon!

Werd Pwess

Welcome to it.