And then a week later, the layout bug bit me again, so I went searching through my image files to find something I liked. I found a scan of a older poster of Dir en grey, and after some trial and error experimentation with the GIMP, I made something I really liked. Instead of a white, faded, angelic layout, it's now a dark, fragmented, mechanical one; the inversion of my intended theme suits me. Please enjoy.
Credits to Tattered Cloth for the image and translated verse for "Schwein no isu" and to vbrush for the brushes.
I was going through a really hard time when I made this, and my feelings came out in this dark and fragmented look. As it says on the side, I had originally been playing with an image of Gackt from Malice Mizer's "Le ciel" look, but nothing really happened. I thought the result didn't look good, so I scrapped the project.
Even if this reflected my feelings, upon looking back at it, I'm not really pleased with it. It feels clunky, and a lot of the little stylistic things annoy me a bit, like the mouseover on the links and the blurred "eins zwei drei vier" at the top. As a note, I realize that the word "one" in German is spelled "ein", but I'm just taking the lyrics Kyo wrote for "Schwein no isu".
For all my irritation, I think 'Deus ex machina' was the start of a shift in the way I make layouts. This was the first time I fiddled with the colors of the base image, changing the balance, saturation, and contrast. All layouts after this one have base images with colors that are altered from the original. I also started using more layers, which tends to beget at least some more complexity in the finished result. So I suppose that this isn't entirely terrible.