Follow Up - Futuristic Organic Button

I was at the library the other day when an idea struck me involving the already made organic styled futuristic button. I quickly drew it down in my sketchbook, which I had bought along to take notes.

Design Process
There's not much for this one.

I worked off the rough sketch, which featured different energy sources all grouped around the futuristic "power" button. My end product was pretty satisfying, which is below here.

Psdtuts

Lately, I've been incredibly bored, so after searching the web for things to do, I rekindled my old Photoshop self and decided to mess around. And then I walked into a wall. Like, a good kind of wall, that didn't really stop you, the kind that allowed you to walk up it and achieve a higher meaning. I know that doesn't really make a lot of sense to you, it doesn't make much sense to me either.

Anyways, the wall we're talking about is Psdtuts. For those who don't know, this isn't some horribly misspelled wording of "pyramids" and "Tutankhamun", Psdtuts in fact makes a lot of sense to people who are familiar with Photoshop. "Psd" is the standard universal file format for Photoshop (.psd), and "tuts", is, well, most people will have the good fortune of guessing "tutorials", which of course is, correct.

I chanced upon this cool "Futuristic Button" tutorial, and I tried it out, with a slightly different result than the actual tutorial, since I never like following tutorials word by word and ending up with the same result. I feel cheated and I have the feeling I just copied somebody. But in the end, I ended up with this:

I wasn't completely satisfied with that result though, so I decided to make another, more organic-looking one from scratch by myself, which resulted in this:

And today, I decided to learn more about designing realistic interfaces and buttons/objects, which I consulted another Psdtuts tutorial. I once again changed my end result, somewhat more dramatically than what I did with my first first button. My end result was this:

Now I'm no professional site reviewer, but if you have Photoshop, and you're interested in learning more about what you can truly do with in, visit Psdtuts, here at: http://psd.tutsplus.com/. You won't regret it.

Flash - Website

I've been thinking about making a fully Flash website since December now, but I haven't gotten much further than the pre-loader until now. But don't worry, I'll include a link on the website that leads back to this blog anyways, so it's not the end of this blog. All the layers and ActionScript is going to take a while, so don't be surprised if I take the summer to finish! Here are a couple of in-progress screenshots:

Here's the pre-loader that got me started on the idea of a website in the first place.

I tweaked the layout for a bit, but eventually I settled on a navbar docked to the left.

Here is the home page, complete with glowing effects on the buttons when you hover your mouse over them, as seen here on the "Blog" button, which (should) links back to the blog right here. No worries, I won't abandon this place anytime soon.

However, after further adjustments and adding ActionScript to the buttons, things started to go a bit... out of plan. Things didn't work out the way I wanted them to, and I'm not sure if there's a way back now:

Everything plays at the exactly same time, running in order on the Flash timeline instead of by what the ActionScript dictates. I'm probably missing some code, but the Compiler Errors detect nothing that I typed wrong. I'll look into to see if I can get someone to look what I've done over.

But, in the end, I started this simply as an experiment, so I guess I'll learn as I go along. Hopefully.