• Completed under employment of NCsoft. Dungeon Runners is a free to play online multiplayer game with an incredibly wacky sense of humor. Starting in June ‘08 you will be able to buy a special edition of Dungeon Runners in many major retail stores. In celebration of the retail launch we redesigned and relaunched DungeonRunners.com, as well as adding a couple new vanity addresses: BlingGnome.com and TheMotherOfAllRPGs.com. My responsibilities included some of the design elements as well as the majority of all the chopping, coding, and integration with Movable Type. Sometime in the next few weeks I’m hoping to write an extended entry of some things I learned and had to consider when relaunching a major, existing site.

  • Completed under employment of NCsoft. City of Heroes in an online, subscription-based super hero multiplayer game. For the first time, they are offering free trial accounts for new players, so they launched a mini-site to gain attention for the promotion. My responsibilities included chopping, coding, and testing the site. The site includes a description of the game, a jquery-powered screenshot viewer, and an embedded flash trailer for the game.

  • Another template for sale at Templamatic, and this time its not WordPress (GASP). I had fun doing just a standard XHTML/CSS template, and I worked in sliding content blocks powered by MooTools.

Two Shrimp Recipes For Summer

I know this post probably doesn’t feel like it belongs here, but I enjoyed cooking the food and taking the pictures so much I just had to post it somewhere. In case you don’t already know: I cook a lot. Its one of my favorite hobbies. My flickr is filled with pictures of the dishes I’ve created. I thought it’d be nice to share some recipes and photos here on the blog. Today we are making Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeno Shrimp and Garlic Shrimp Scampi.
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WordPress 2.6 Released

A new version of WordPress has just been released with quite a few changes and new features. I’m surprised we are already getting an update because it feels like just yesterday they unleashed 2.5 on us. The new version can track post/page edits over time, has an image caption feature, adds improvement to media handling, and implements Gears, an open source browser extension developed by Google. Here is a rundown of the changes:

Official post on WordPress.org

Clark is Officially Employed (Gasp!)

After a couple years of freelancing, I finally decided to see if I could cut it at a “real” job. I applied and was hired by NCsoft, the world’s leading developer and publisher of MMORPGs. My official title is “Web Production Specialist” and so far its been a blast. I work with a small team of skilled developers to maintain all the sites for all the titles NCsoft releases. I plan on keeping ClarkLab alive for the many personal projects I’ve got going on, but from time to time I will be posting updates from my new job as well. My first project was to code the mini-site for the new City of Heroes 14-day free trial, which you can see above. Also, today we launched the site for the upcoming title Aion, and it was the first major website rollout I’ve been a part of. We pushed it live and within minutes there were pages of comments on Aion fan sites about the new launch which were enjoyable and interesting to read. Thats all I have to report for now, I just wanted to leave a quick note to explain the lack of updates around here. I’m still alive, just now I sit behind a desk eight hours a day.

CSS Bits, A New Series At Templamatic

Today over at Templamatic, I started a new series titled CSS Bits. Each article has a quick explanation of a popular technique, along with a downloadable pack of CSS and images. The first article is Confirmation Message Boxes. I’m planning on trying to post at least weekly, so you might want to bookmark the CSS Bits section of the blog. Thats it for now, go check it out!

Photoshop Tutorial: Web 2.0 Layout Basics, From Templamatic

I posted a tutorial over at Templamatic today, and you can read the whole thing in the Templamatic Blog. The tutorial is just a basic walk through explaining important style points of web 2.0 template design. From now on, I will be posting my web design tutorials over at Templamatic, but I’ll always make a little alert here to make sure everyone sees it.

Templamatic’s First Free Theme

Today we started a new feature over at Templamatic called Free Template Friday. Today’s free template is WPViddler, a video blog theme powered by WordPress and Viddler. It features the most recent videos, video commenting, a separate blog and video section, a widget ready sidebar, and is designed for use with WordPress 2.5. All you have to do to get it is register, and that takes less than a minute, so go get it!

WordPress 2.5 Released

WordPress 2.5 has finally been realeased! The long awaited update adds a lot of new functionality and a totally redesigned admin panel. I wrote a review of it over on the Templamatic Blog, you can read my article here…

Photoshop Tutorial: Web 2.0 Layout

Despite the fact that its quickly becoming a cliche, the style of web 2.0 still has a lot of nice techniques that are worth learning. This layout utilizes all the big web 2.0 standards: bright colors, gradient fades, drop shadows, and rounded edges. The key to all of these things is mastering selections. It sounds weird, but the key to good web design with Photoshop is making good selections. Almost every step of this tutorial includes making a selection.

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Nerd Crest Selected by Fray

fray A while back, I was browsing around on YayHooray, and saw a link to Pixish. I poked around for a while because I really liked the site layout, and while I was there I noticed Fray was holding a call for submissions for its next issue, which is geek themed. I thought it’d be a nice place for my Nerd Crest illustration so I submitted it and pretty much forgot about it until just now. I got an email from Derek Powazek (who runs Fray and Pixish) telling me that my submission was going to be used on the call for entries page on the Fray site. Since I primarily do web development now, its fun to see something non web related I made get noticed. Anyway, I just thought it was worth mentioning here, and if you have something to submit, the deadline is the end of April, so get on it.

Photoshop Tutorial - Drop Shadow Overhang

overhang.jpgThis is a very popular look, and I’m not sure if it has an official name, so I’m going to just call it a ‘drop shadow overhang’ just because I don’t know what else to call it. Its basically a bar of color across the top of the page, with a box of white jetting up over the edge. Its got a web 2.0 look, so its been getting a lot of use.

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