Before I became a geek, I was an artist

When I was in my pre-teens, my hobby was digital art using PhotoImpact (no, not Photoshop... I couldn't afford that) and making websites with HTML. For the longest time in the late 90s, I managed and operated a huge fansite for a Holywood actor I admired (I bet you don't know him). When that became too much to handle, I moved to blogging and designing my own blogs.

And then, when the social network Multiply became popular in the early 21st century, I got into designing multiply accounts using CSS and HTML. I even offered my services to several online shops; my little business went by the name ThemeFreak. When I entered the university, I got into a lot of organizations and made tons of designs for them, no longer for websites though: posters, shirt designs, tarpaulins, among others. I was in the publicity committee of the UP Circle of Entrepreneurs for which I designed the most.

This page here is just a repository of some creative digital stuff I've made throughout those years... At least the ones I've managed to dig up. Unfortunately, I have no more records of the fansite designs I made, nor do I have all of the blog layouts I created.

Many of these files are recreated from old cut up parts of the layouts I recovered from my old Photobucket account, which used to host all images I designed for websites and blogs. By cut up, I mean: background image, top/bottom banner, left menu, etc.

Nowadays, I just sporadically participate in drawing challenges like Inktober, sometimes I'd write a poem, or a song. You'll find more of those on my Instagram art dump account @artnivigile.

Blogs & Websites

Personal blog layout

This was the only blog design that I could recover from my own blog. This one was in the early 2000s and used iframes. I remember when I discovered iframes, it just opened the floodgates to my layouting creativity, because I was no longer bound to the usual margins of the page.

First CVIF Website

My uncle and aunt run a little school in the province of Bohol, Philippines and for a while throughout the 2000s I was the one running their site. I designed the site layout and set it up with HTML. This was quite a feat for me to program, with scrolling updates and a menu bar that opens to sub-options. Of course, these days that's nothing special, but back then, it was all old-school HTML programmed in Notepad.

Multiply Themes

Multiply was tricky because it had a very rigid general format: top banner, body on the left, profile picture and links on the right bar. And they formatted everything with CSS, which until then I didn't know existed. I think all the curvy, slanting lines in my designs were my way of breaking free from the rigid top-left-right structure Multiply imposed.

And then there were those clients who asked for more than just a multiply theme, but also other pages like a crazy-ass interactive order form, among other things.

Other artsy stuff

There's probably a filter for this nowadays, but back then, I did all the vector art of my friends by hand.

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