Instant Ramen

Do you recognize these two websites? To the left is DannyChoo.com, and to the right is Instant-Ramen.net April Fools’ layout (if you’re a regular DC user you won’t see the welcome page though — check the static DannyChoo screenshot). I promised to write about why and how I ripped mimicked DannyChoo’s, so here’s the real FAQ:

Note: I did not use any of DC’s original source files (be it HTML, CSS styles, images), I did the whole layout from scratch, only by looking at Danny’s layout — my Dual Monitor setup helped a lot though. I was a bit scared that I would be receiving calls and threats from ninja lawyers >_<, but fortunately Danny Choo LOL’d ^^;

Why?

Well, actually I had to migrate my other websites, and since I wasn’t too sure about how to do it, I had decided to put Instant Ramen down in the meantime, just so that databases and files were exactly mirrored (my other websites had some downtime). The whole thing was planned about two weeks before April, so I suddenly thought that mimicking DC’s layout would be funny, challenging, and a perfect way to put down IR’s content for mantainance!

Reception

Since I decided to publish the new and unique layout on April 1st in Japan, it was still March on the West, which confused quite a few fellas. The DC member news asking for feedback for my new layout produced quite a lot of bashing, including comments like “instant rip off of DC” or “is this a joke?”, until a few users found out it was a trap! I’d also like to thank Twitterers Goddess Carlie and Reesan, who played along very well ^^ as well as Chris, Mike, and Jerome; and of course to all JapanSoc’ers! :)

Update: As for Google, both Feedburner and Google didn’t like my update, and most of my permalinked posts were now showing the fake April Fool’s information, which was probably the worst SEO move I’ve ever done. Not that I receive that much of a traffic through Google yet, and besides I’ve switched back to my layout and Google seems to be liking it. :)

Technical Details

As for the layout, I was initially going to mimick the whole DC website, but Danny Choo decided to change his gateway pages a few days ago, which ruined the whole plan T__T, so I decided to keep some parts that still look like DC (for example the Delicious Feeds to your right) since I already had them working and fully operational. Anyway, designing and CSS’ing the whole layout took me about 4-5 hours which could’ve been spent watching animé or Jdrama ^^

The header took me about 20 minutes to complete, the most challenging part was finding a font similar to Danny’s logo and the “d” icon. My shadows don’t look too good, and the logo does not look that all too crispy — I’m not a fan of designing through Photoshop or Illustrator, and my Vector graphics program doesn’t have any shadow-like filter so I had to do it manually, and rendered fonts don’t look crispy enough.

As for the collage, I didn’t use too many dark pictures, which was my mistake and had to add much more shadows to my logos (did it with Photoshop this time though). Danny’s photos are clearly superior than mine T_T though I’m proud of the pictures I took! I enjoyed doing my own collage but I have to admit that I spent some time watching at my own Japan gallery.

As for the buttons, I think I did a good job and also matched DC’s fonts, though it wasn’t too much of a challenge (he probably knows why). Danny’s Japanese text reads “Japanese users here”, while mine reads “Udon-lovers here” ^^;

As for the preferences, I decided to take a little spin from Danny’s version. Udon tastes great, but nothing beats a good bowl of ramen! As for the figure skating…

For those who are clueless, mirai.fm is Danny Choo’s CGM Company (logo above). Mirai means future in Japanese, which is a nice. Anyway, my logo marui.fm means “round” in Japanese — only changed two letters and completely destroyed a good name ^o^. I didn’t spend much time creating my logo (looks like crap and not too similar to marui.fm) since I’m not good at creating vectors from scratch. Still, nailed the “a” quite well.

Finally, as for the mascot, since I wanted to keep the layout as original as possible, I decided to use Amy-chan, from the latest Independent video-game for Dreamcast, Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles (Japanese website), created by my company Yuan Works :)

Hope you enjoyed April 1st as much as I did reading a few pranks and creating my own too. Had quite a lot of fun and learned a few tricks that Danny uses, after a guru of teh internetz. I’ll be updating my layout (for real) on the next few days taking into account the small details that I learned. I hope you guys enjoyed my small prank and those who were fooled, mark your next year’s calendar! Again, thanks to Danny Choo for not taking it seriously and laughing, and for supplying the internet with Japan content for us JLovers =)

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