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Alex Romanova
Alex Romanova

Posted on • Updated on

Seeing the finish line

About us

People can now start doing translations!

I had 2 ideas driving me when I wanted to change this page. Firstly, I wanted to get away from an old concept of a Planet, as we are in 2022 now. People wouldn't understand this old concept, and might as well describe Telescope as what it actually is, instead of what it came from.

Secondly, I wanted to reduce the historical part of About us, however I struggled with it. I wanted the page to be concise, with some elements of history, but not having history be the most important part. I struggled to reduce the amount of historical description, as I was unsure which parts were important for people. I know someone wrote those at some point, therefore thinking they were important. So who would I be to remove them?

It didn't take me much time to edit the page, but it did to make a PR. Something always goes wrong with me and PRs and this time was no different... Either way, it landed, all was done.

Art? SVG?

I have done a vector.. thing... I struggle to call it art, since I associate art with a drawing process, while vector is more about composing things together. Vector images can be exported as SVGs. SVG is a format that consists of HTML and CSS formulas, basically. A single SVG takes a lot of code to just paste in. I have an idea to make some effects to this image, so I have exported it into different layers. Therefore, I had 5 SVGs that I needed to stack on top of each other. However, I have found a problem of putting those SVGs somewhere. They are too big really to just paste into code. So, I'd probably need to put them separately. But I'm not sure how to handle them in terms of react and where to put them in terms of structure. So, I asked for help. Francesco actually gave me instruction on how to do it, which was very helpful. I didn't make a PR in time for alpha, but at this stage I don't have much left to do. I will make a PR shortly. After that initial static image stage, I can start toying around with a parallax effect.

I usually struggle a lot to show it when I make any kind of art. While I am creating, I enter this "critic" mode, which is designed to find and fix errors. Therefore, I don't really see a picture, I just see imperfection. When I am done with my art, usually there is still something wrong with it, but I'm unable to fix it or define it. So I see my art as bad. That is what has been happening with this night sky thing. I needed a couple days of not looking at it to refresh my mind, to be able to see it as a new image and actually figure out if it's good. And now for me it is! Well, at least not bad or awful, like I thought a couple days ago. So I am okay with showing what I got right here and now. It's an Illustrator screenshot, so the sizes are off for the parallax effect to later work. And white space is just the background that won't be there in the final product.

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curiousdev profile image
CuriousDev

This is definitely art, art does not depend on how you create it! Also it is a nice image. For the part of including it in the page, what exactly is the issue? For my knowledge, you can put the SVG code into the HTML code, which gives you some possibilites to use it with JavaScript or just reference the SVG file (just like an image file), which will at least add less content to it.