Information
The Webmistress
Name: Yui (Yuewei)
Gender: Female
Age: 20
Birthdate: April 25, 1987
Website: LastSong.net
Email: yui@lastsong.net
AIM: silentfirefly
MSN: yiris99@hotmail.com
Webdesign History: I started my webdesigning career at the age of 12 with a shabby little tribute to Sailorsaturn of Sailormoon, my favorite character at the time. I initially used MS Paint for the litting graphic editing that I could muster at the time. It wasn't until I was about 14 that I first began experimenting first with Paint Shop Pro, then with Adobe Photoshop. At 15, I bought my first domain name: KuroiTenshi.net, which I kept for about 2 years. At that point, I began to think that the name was a bit too long and hard to remember and so, purchased my current domain of LastSong.net. I now use Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for graphics editing and Notepad++ for coding.
Style and Philosophy: My motto has long been that a good designer can make a kick-ass graphic from any image she's given, or from no base picture at all. Of course, I don't pretend to have achieved that level of skill ^^; but it's something I strive for. Perhaps owing to the type of images I tend to choose for my graphics, most of my work has a sort of elegant, but dark and grungy aura. I often try to convey a sort of exquisite chaos, a graceful maddness that is at once beautiful and grotesque. Of course, I try to branch out from my usual style once in a while as well.
The Domain
Neogrotesque is the title of a song by Pierrot from their ID Attack album. While I've never really been a big fan of the band and only like a few of their songs, this title made a particularly strong impression on me. "A new grotesque," I think, very much reflects not only the artistic style I try to convey in most of my graphics, but also the look, sound, and feel of much of the jrock world in general, and the visual kei subculture in particular. One line from the song struck me as especially fitting: "君は誰よりも美しくｸﾞﾛﾃｽｸよ"--"you are more beautiful and grotesque than anyone."
The Site
Under its original title, Firefly Studios, Neogrotesque opened on June 27, 2004 as a sort of jack-of-all-trades graphics site. It featured jrock, anime/manga, game, and neutral graphics somewhat equally. As time passed, however, I found myself increasingly making jrock graphics and neglecting the other areas of the site. As a result, in June 2006, I learned PHP/MySQL, recoded the site, and shifted the focus to primarily jrock graphics. On June 15, 2006, I renamed the site Neogrotesque and moved it to its own domain, where it now resides.