Creative Confusion

Well, now that The Weekend Chef and Nothing Tastes As Good have been successfully converted to WordPress and completely redesigned with my own handiwork (built on a borrowed design, of course), I find myself eyeing The Naked Truth. As cute as I think this crop circle theme is, it’s not my theme and the programmer in me wants something that got my touch to it.

I’ve had a couple of ideas for themes/skins but I’ve run into a few road blocks. Since it’s been years since I’ve been really developing in the web environment, I seem to have lost touch a little with the lingo and the way things work. It used to be that you could find tons of graphics and photos and such online to copy and use. There were repositories of web icons and buttons a-plenty. Most of it was free though linking back was appreciated.

Now I’m finding most graphics on the web are copyrighted. There’s all kinds of rules and legality about using them. Plus, most of the web graphic sites I’ve found are just junky sites with circular links going back and forth to each other and a few cheesy graphics.

OR you can buy a photo to use for anywhere from $5 to $100 depending on the website or the service.

And as I wander around the web, site-seeing at other blogs and design sites, I see such fabulous and polished artwork and I’m jealous and I would love to know where they found them. I asked a message board once where to get good images for use in website design. I was directed toward Creative Commons. In fact, I see a lot of references to Creative Commons around the web, but my searches on the site have been less than satisfactory. Obviously I don’t know the trick. I also tried Yahoo! Search’s Creative Commons Search but those searches came up even more broad.

I did find an artist’s site who I like and I am currently trying to get permission to access her tubes. What the heck are tubes? This is a term I am completely at a loss for. When did appear in web lingo? What does it mean? As best as I can figure, I think it’s photos with cut-outs on a transparent background…I think.

Anyway, she does some interesting work with fairies and I thought I might look around and see if I could use some for this page. Might be different.

I’d also like to do a design with the caffeine molecule, but not those god-awful 3-D renderings. However, I haven’t found anything appropriate as of yet. Most people seem to associate caffeine with coffee, but for me caffeine isn’t restricted to coffee and I want the design to reflect that.

Anyway, if I do end up making several designs, I guess I’ll have to install a style switcher and then folks can view the site as they prefer. In the meantime, I’ll continue to spend a few hours in the evenings trying to find graphics to use. *sigh*

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