the interface graveyard

Erté Beads Mockup--Ginkgo's Pile of Leaves

One of these days I will finish this. I'd strung about half the beads, hadn't touched her skin or touch-up stuff yet (as you can see, I worked off of an Erté drawing, "tracing" over it with beads...eventually I would have fixed her skin and rough edges and so on--check out the open eye I drew for her, I was inordinately proud of it since I can't draw to save my life!), and got royally sick of the tedium. To make it more worthwhile, I worked on the text and sparkles and java for awhile and made this mockup to keep my spirits up. And that's when I found out just how huge this interface would be--it would take forever to load, something which is totally unacceptable for one's main index. So it's been shelved, and I'll return to it another day to finish it just for myself, and to perhaps try to compress the graphics enough so that it can be an "alternate interface" accessed through this page. Right now it's just a clumsy mockup, but even so, I think it's pretty neat. Very, very girly-girl, but also pretty neat. You can view it at 800x600, but it's best at 1024x768 so that you can see the whole interface without scrolling. (Another reason it's here in the graveyard for now.)

Looking back at theses now, I tend to cringe, but once I loved them, and what are we without our past? Besides, I'm sentimental, there's still bits about them I like, and it's good to remind myself how far I've come on those days when my current site makes me cringe.

Dreaming Among the Jade Clouds--May 1998

This is essentially what my first journal index looked like, except with a modified background. I adored this design, and stuck with it for ages. Finally at the end of 1998 I decided I needed a change, and built the new interface with the film borders and the camera.

Ginkgo's Pile of Leaves--1998

It's not fancy, but I loved this "design"--white with a ginkgo leaves border (which you've seen elsewhere in this site) and tons of graphics. It's not much changed from my original first-ever homepage, just spruced a bit and wearing a nicer dress than when it first hit the web. In March of 1999 I finally decided that I needed a big change (well, I'd decided that earlier but not come up with an interface I liked yet) and built the green and black frames version which is up now.

Jade Leaves Designs--1997-8 placeholder page

I made the graphics for this in September of 1997, I think, and later threw this page together to serve as a placeholder for a future business site, one which I still haven't found the motivation to put together. This served as a placeholder all through 1998, and was finally replaced when I moved my personal site into jade-leaves' index slot. The page is about the level of a kindergarden fingerpainting on the refridgerator, but I'm equally sentimental about it.

I'm sentimental and a packrat, so I've decided to leave traces of my earlier web existance scattered about.
Here you'll find old designs and indexes which I loved, and in many cases you'll be able to trace your way back through a few more levels of old pages. Eventually, though, you'll probably run into a bad link or a revamped page.
Feel free to explore, but keep any comments about how rotten my old work supposedly was to yourselves.
It's been a long learning process, and it's nowhere near over.
(And yes, as far as html and web graphics go, I'm completely self-taught.)