Design Outline Page
My interest is in art, and my purpose here is to share my joy of design with others. Mandalas provide a colorful and balanced way for an artist, or just about anybody, to express themselves. I hope that my audience will enjoy the artwork that I have included on this website as well as in the links I have provided. I created the Mandala Gallery banner myself. I also created the mandalas in the two galleries. I made two gallerys because I thought there was so much difference in the looks and creation between the handmade and the computer generated art. The round mandala on the home page was actually a kaleidescope of the main header banner, and in it you can see the colors and letter forms.
I found the code to the image slideshow online at: dhtmlgoodies.com http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?whichScript=image_slideshow2 I tried a couple of different ones and this seemed to fit. I wanted one with a preview pane. Most did not have those, and I wanted that option. I had to alter the code in different ways to make it fit my needs. That mostly had to do with the size of the viewer and the spacing to allow the caption to show.
The same applied to my navigation buttons. I must have spent a whole day figuring out the colors and how to make them in a straight line instead of a column. The colors on the borders have to be "just right" or they won't look 3-d. I got the code from a website called, "Listamatic".
I know that dark backgrounds are considered by some not to be good web design. I wanted it dark because I believe the mandala colors shine and are defined better than with white. After all, dark is simply the absence of light. So it only makes sense that to show off bright images, one would used a dark background. For me, a light background dissolves the focus of the color, and I hope others would agree in this case. It's like watching a movie in a dark theater.
For the graphics of others on the list page: I wrote to as many of those sites as I could for permission. Some (believe it or not!) had no contact information. Others have not written back. I feel that the usage of their artwork is only to enhance their own sites. It provides a tiny glimpse of their work if a reader would like to visit their site. The pictures are obviously linked with them, not me and I make no claims to their authorship. I like to have the plain text coding of a link next to the link if possible. That way people can copy/paste if they are having difficulties.