Self-Styled: The Graphic Arts of Code Redd Net

Code Redd Net has never had a budget, or an office, or an art department. Everything we've done, Chicken Man and I, we've done ourselves, on our own time, with our own skills. Some of our attempts were, shall we say, a trifle amateurish. This has resulted in some rather humorous graphics floating around in our archives, from the (g)olden days of Geocities. I've tried to utilize these old files whenever possible on the blog, but there's some that, stubbornly, just don't have a place around here. Here's a collection of these dated, perhaps unused, images.

As you can see, for a time we liked to have banners at the top of each page. I remember when we had a Beats page, even if nobody else does. Also, we really dug Rush Hour 2. And I don't know about you, but my favorite is certainly the News banner. Mr. T, Bill O'Reilly, and is that Peekaboo Jones from TimeSplitters? Goodness, yes it is.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Chicken Man nameplate collection. Obviously, we tried out a few different styles over the years, but none, I wager, were as aesthetically unappealing as that second one.

Man, I miss my Tour Bus, like Chicken Man misses his Lair, I'm sure. Anyway, we had some interesting ideas for pages. Grillz existed primarily as a means to making fun of X-Play and other things we disliked at the time, and I'm only guessing when I tell you that I think Toasts was its opposite, though we never wrote any that I know of.

What you see here is are a few makeshift logos for games and movies that, at the time, had not been released yet. Incidentally, both Spy Hunter 2 and Rush Hour 3 were decidedly mediocre. You can see it in Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's faces below; Jackie looks off into the distance, horrified, while Chris seems concerned, but stoically determined to meet his fate, that being the end of his relevance in pop culture.

Oh, and thank the good Lord these redesigned logos were never used. I couldn't live with myself knowing that I changed our name from "Code Redd Net" to the infinitely grotesque "The Code."

Finally, here's some random pictures I found in the archives. Not sure what they are doing in there, but perhaps they'll help to cleanse the palate. A sorbet, if you will.