WEBCORE//ENAWAVE

First of all, what the HECK is Webcore or Enawave? are those real words? Well, kinda, it's what the zoomers and milenials (eg: me) call the 'vibe' or 'aesthetic' of the early internet era.

Now what's so special about this piece?

Well, it's a love letter of sorts, to my "cringe anime phase" from the early 00's, fully embraced in this one image.

It's an accurate recreation of the Windows Vista UI in photoshop with some of my own touches. It took me nearly 9 hours to make this UI look accurate to it's source material. The website and media player were also done completely from scratch, and a little more obviously was the taskbar too.

The hardest part of this project was trying to get the windows look right. It's that slight drop shadow, the teensy single pixle inner glow of white around the edges, the touch of glass-like transparency, the dip and rise in the buttons, the slight glow around the window text. It's the littlest details I wanted to get right on the piece, because what better way to learn than from the best?

Of course, the images of Konata from the anime and background aren't mine, along with the music covers on the player and games in the ad, but everything surrounding and hosing those images is handmade. The website is inspired by a certain famous free-anime website I may have frequented in the past.

I hope at first glance you thought "Woah! why is Baz posting a screenshot from a super old operating system?", because that was the goal :)

Here's a closer look at some of those UI elements