I’m slowly becoming a huge fan of simplicity, especially with launch pages (think of it as a splash page that’s actually useful!) I’m really lucky to have found such amazing stock images, which were a snap to piece together. The main background is wood paneling, on top of which I added a Hue with some splotches of greens, oranges, and yellows to get that warm colour. Over that is a trail of purple-toned lights/sparkles with Soft Light, which actually makes a drastic difference. The silhouette of the girl was painstakingly cut out from a vector (the original background was a super-bright magenta with flowers), duplicated, and added on top; one layer with 100% Darken and another with a 40% Multiply. It gives the silhouette effect without losing the faint outlines of the hairpiece or her dress. Title font is The King and Queen and the navigation is one of my absolute favourites, Geo Sans Light.

My favourite part, of course, is the way the particles of light are streaming from her hand. The positioning of her head almost makes it seem like she’s blowing them away from the palm of her hand, which gives an overall frivolous yet elegant look to the site. I originally had a quote under the title (“I’m tough, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.” -Madonna) but decided that (1) Usage of the word “bitch” on a semi-professional website isn’t the best thing to do, and (2) It detracted from the flowing feeling of the lights. I played around with subtext on the title as well, but in the end chose this version. It feels almost like the landing page of a fashion designer’s website, haha.

All this work, though, is primarily a mockup (that’s a flattened image). In the final version, the navigation will have colour-changing hovers (my favourite). And I have yet to decide how I want to do the actual content pages, since I don’t think the launch page layout is particularly fitting for text-heavy content, especially for readability’s sake. I’m really excited to launch but it will probably be another week or two before that happens.