This is one of the more wordier pages, and it will tell you all about Astatine Creations and its history.
I first had the idea of naming my site after an element after I visited
Chie's awesome website,
Synthoxide. (In those early days Astatine Creations was kind of like a wannabe-Synthoxide -- I was making a lot of vector-inspired layouts and wallpapers.)
Astatine Creations is named after the element
Astatine, a rare and radioactive chemical element with the symbol
At and atomic number 85. When I was thinking of a name for my site I wrote down a list of at least fifty names, some okay, others horrible. But none of the names I could think of really jumped out at me. I chose the name Astatine Creations because it sounded cool, interesting, and unique, which are adjectives that I hoped people would use to describe my site when it got a little better.
It all began when I started watching anime and reading manga in my elementary school years. I liked Tokyo Mew Mew and Sailor Moon O.o
When I was in fifth or sixth grade, my friend introduced me to
Neopets. And so I brought with me to Neopets my love for anime. I was obsessed with playing Neopets: playing the games, managing my items, and interacting with other users (mostly the same friend, my sister, some school friends, and other random people). My friend started a Tokyo Mew Mew guild, and we were obsessed with making layouts, contests, and ugly graphics on MS Paint for the guild. I learned very basic HTML so I could code userlookups, guild layouts, and shop blogs. Soon, my account got frozen because I was advertizing a guild contest on the message boards. LOL. After that I made another account, but
I quickly lost interest in it. In 2006, the same friend who introduced me to Neopets opened her first anime graphics site over the summer. She was still using MS Paint, and so was I. I visited her site for a while, and then opened my own graphics and resources site,
Mistflower Graphics, on January 24th, 2007. By then I was using
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. The site was hosted on
Freewebs, and had extremely ugly graphics, including avatars, signs, Neopets shop blogs, textures, PNGs, and layouts. I was really dedicated to learning more HTML and CSS, but my layout codings were still horrible. x_x Also, I was a bit afraid of applying for affiliates and link exchanges, knowing my site wasn't good enough, and that a lot of the sites I applied to link exchange with were subdomains or domains, while I had a free host. However, I was improving. Maintaining Mistflower Graphics was good experience for my beginnings in web design.
After about five months, I decided to close down Mistflower Graphics because I wanted to start over with my designs without the pressure of updating or keeping in contact with affiliates and link exchanges. I spent the summer, fall, and winter of 2007 making graphics, designs, and resources on the upgraded
Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0. It was great, because I could do it in my own free time and not have to worry about finding time for the site when school started.
Finally, in January of 2008 I applied for hosting at
Synthoxide and began working on my new site,
Astatine Creations, only...er...it didn't officially open until the beginning of August.
