avalonstar:distortion

Oh, you might remember this one. Well, you should.

XII is important to Avalonstar’s history for 3 reasons.

1. It solidified my love for the pen tool.
2. It was the first version that tried to evolve the Phoenix logo into something version specific. In this case, a heart made of two swan shapes.
3. It was the only version which used serif for the majority of the site.

Alright, not THAT significant I guess. ChaoticSoul was the simplest of all the Avalonstar layouts to date, even for the standards-era versions to come after it (which is probably why it was so easy to make into a theme). As a theme, it peaked at 3rd place for the most used theme on WordPress.com (excluding the default one.) As a site, if I had to rank it, it would be my favorite of the era’s designs. Not because it’s simple, but because the aesthetic still holds to the present day. It would only last a few months before being taken down, and a few years before being immortalized as a WordPress theme.

If you’re interested, take a look at (what’s left) of version XII. »

“Quod me nutrit me destruit” translates to “What nourishes me also destroys me,” the slogan adorning the top of one of the darkest Avalonstar designs (quite literally). If we had an emo-meter for the different Avalonstars, this would probably rate highest. XIII introduced me to the delightful sickness that is Helvetica, a sickness I wouldn’t revisit until closer to present time.

XIII had an addiction to the mosaic effect and diagonal lines, as the style is on every single page of the site. In trying to acquire some sort of theme, XIII took the angle off prefixing every section name with “Art of…” which sort of worked for the time. Other than that, XIII was malnourished and eventually the cause of my first long hiatus from design as my heart wasn’t there to keep it going.

Not much survived, but here’s version XIII. »

Released on New Years Eve, The Moon of Syn would also be a short lived attempt to pull me out of my hiatus. XV’s name is derived from Jen and my handles at the time, “moon_of_ice” and “synicide” respectively. It happens to be one of my favorite project names of all the Avalonstars, obviously for the connection to Jen and I.

XV would be the first to have a “Nostalgia” section, much like the one you see now, minus a colophon and adding a personal A/S/L page. Design-wise, it was sort of a mashup of versions XII and XIII, citing XII for the layout and XIII for the excess diagonal lines. Regarding the logo, I had a lot of fun making a sort of tribal motif with the Phoenix.

Take a look at an almost complete copy of version XV. »

It’s actually kind of odd that the button for these two versions fall in the middle, as I’d always find myself saying that July of 2005 would be the split between the portfolio era of Avalonstar and the blogging era of Avalonstar. Although this wasn’t the first version of Avalonstar that contained a blog (that was version XVIII in September of 2004), it was the first version whose scope grew out of the personal realm. Gone was the about page with all the AOL A/S/L type talk. I had just graduated college, maybe it was time for me to grow up a little.

Just like version XI before it, XX was released during the summer, pretty much 3 years to the day, after a failed attempt at a version XIX that stayed online for all of a week. The first order of business after taking XIX offline was to add a shield to the Phoenix. The second would be to find some kind of header image for the new design. With the help of iStockPhoto, the fruit salad was born. I have no idea why I chose fruit salad, even to this day the closest explanation I can come up with is that it fit well in the large rounded box.

I was still a relative newcomer to the blogging movement that had started while I was still using the name as a portfolio site, but the movement took the place by storm and I probably wouldn’t have been able to get my first job out of college without it.

Revision two, which would come to be a whole different version in itself was launched for the Fall CSSReboot of that year. Version XXI would forever link my name and Avalonstar’s with eggrolls. As a site, version XXI added a sort of extra gloss to the design and the first round of Avalonstar t-shirts were launched while this version was up.

There was a lot of fun to be had with the fruit salad and the eggrolls. The eggrolls were even awarded the prestigious 2006 SXSW Best Blog award. However, a new version would dawn a few months later.

The Aries Project, or version XXII launched during the 2006 CSSReboot and would be the final version to launch on a deadline that wasn’t self-imposed. Aries brought the dark back to Avalonstar, a fact that some weren’t to thrilled about. I would fondly remember it as being the most information heavy version of Avalonstar before Distortion. XXII would be the first version since version III to have anime images featured, these coming from the anime Azumanga Daioh.

The version introduced a set 7 category system, each category ending with the word “rockstar.” The reasons for the naming would trace back to a former vice president of product at Facebook. It aimed to be a more dynamic site by setting cookies to determine how many times the visitor had been to the site and as such, changing the look of the homepage to strip away content that would be redundant to repeat visitors. It worked, sort of. Needless to say, cookies haven’t been used since.

XXII would become Avalonstar’s look for two separate timeframes after the next version was scrapped.

Sparked by an attempt by Dan Cederholm of Simplebits to redesign live, XXIII was known for starting as a plain, no-stylesheet version of the Sandbox theme. It would progress into another dark layout with a semi-grid system in the months to follow.

While it never became a finished product, it ultimately set some firsts and some precedents for Avalonstar. It would be the only version in which the Phoenix shield would be accompanied by a sword, an idea which was later scrapped for being too complex. The live redesign allowed for a lot of experimentation with of all things, the post layout, one which would carry on through the next few versions.

However, as it was mentioned in Aries’ story, XXII would replace XXIII. XXIII would also be the final version of Avalonstar that used WordPress or any packaged content-management system for that matter.

Goodbye indeed. XXIV marked a goodbye to the “rockstar” category system and to the traditional content management system, in lieu of one being custom built off of Django. Launching after the 2007 May 1st Reboot, version XXIV leaves the worst taste in my mouth. Not only was I new to Django (never build a blogging app as your first production-ready app), the design was a complete cop-out. Although it was an attempt to go back to the lighter side of the color palette, my head was too wrapped around the concept of the grid to do anything worthwhile with it.

All of this eventually lead to a lack of motivation to write, with it later being replaced by the placeholder for Distortion. However, it did introduce the notion of having different applications besides the basic blogging one present in the form of a Dance Dance Revolution statistics tracker, which incidentally was my second application built on Django. It was also the first version to adorn the first official revision of the Avalonstar Phoenix.

Even though this version was numbered as XXV, I would later revoke it and give it to its rightful owner, Distortion which wouldn’t appear until nearly a year after.

This is the version you’re looking at, obviously. :) Well, what you’re looking at right now is the 5th revision of the original idea for Distortion. The name Distortion was inspired by Konami’s 13th version of their Beatmania IIDX DJ-ing music game—IIDX Distorted.

After creating 4-5 Django apps in the time since XXIV (with more in the works), XXV’s backend is one of the most solid I have built thus far and has gone through several revisions since the code base was born a few months after the demise of XXIV. As a design, Distortion went through 5 major idea revisions; the first being a very simple black and white large-header layout progressing into the infinitely more complex version you see now. This 5th revision wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for a mixup in the way the 4th revision was designed, but everything seemed to time itself perfectly for Distortion.

Distortion sets even more firsts for Avalonstar. It is the most graphically complex and the most technically complex of all the versions and it is also the first version to use a base color that is neither blue, black or white. That fact was a complete accident. It is the first Avalonstar layout to use any sort of presentational JavaScript (using JQuery), the first to use grunge as a style and it is also the first version to feature the Avalonstar logo at such a gigantic size, albeit cropped.

Finally, Distortion came with a vow. Just as this version is graphically different from all previous ones, all future ones given a roman numeral will be just as graphically complex.