Key Zero is the most recent title for the journal, and the longest lasting by far.  It originally came from the tarot card, The Fool, which represents the spirit of adventure at the start of a journey, to put it briefly.  I felt that, if it didn't exactly characterize myself and my approach to things, it at least ought to.  Because I was, and still am, at a point in my life when many new things are coming my way, and I need to learn to handle them well.

1 The first design, true to the intent of the title, featured a depiction of The Fool from the Morgan-Greer tarot deck.  The sidebar was back, but, again, didn't last.

2 With the second version, I had already begun to explore other conceps related to zero, since always using tarot cards would be boring.  The basis was the idea that "something always remains", which I explained thus:

Any thread that enters one's life will always be there, if only in some tiny form.  It's like chaos theory for life, I suppose: a stranger says hello to you on the street, and years later you have a mental breakdown.

The design shows streaks of color, representing events in life, that slowly fade to white.  But really, white is just all of the colors combined.

The title graphic also expressed the concept mathematically, stating that the limit of memory, as time approaches infinity, is zero.  Except limits are never truly reached.

3 The third version marked my transition from hand-coded entries to Movable Type.  With that, I stopped being able to keep a record of all of my layouts in the code themselves, but the archives were getting to the point that they needed to be standardized anyway.

The design, hastily made, is nothing spectacular.  It makes use of a sidebar as navigation, including excerpts to the previous and next entries, something I could only manage to do with an automated publishing system.

4 The fourth design is almost entirely CSS-based, which I hope will make it possible to redesign in the future without republishing my archives, though I will not necessarily refrain from doing that, either.  I kept the sidebar-style navigation from the previous version, but overall the layout has a lot more flair.

5 The fifth and last design is just a style sheet switch away from the fourth, and yet it looks quite different, I'd say.  Subtitled "Reckless Fire", the opening to the anime Scryed, it's meant to reflect a slightly more cynical and yet still courageous and forward-looking Foolish sentiment.  The header image quotes two lines from the song: "Yesterday's truths become today's lies" and "Dreams and love are illusions of convenience".

Fitting to the theme, I went for a much bolder look than I usually do, replete with fiery top border, achieved with a trick of DIV layers.  Betraying my humble origins (i.e. being stuck with a crappy monitor beyond its time), the design is not compatible with 800×600 screen resolutions, although each column is still viewable so that no side-scrolling is required.  To be honest, I kind of like the results of both.  In particular, the additional design freedom, even if just used for whitespace.

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