Working with a mouse, as a designer, is not the most fluid and creative way to input to your computer. I used the Wacom Intuos tablet a few years ago when I worked in an Ad agency, and really missed the feeling of drawing and navigating with a pen. It was so much more like using a sketchbook rather than the dull point and click experience you get with a mouse. Mice are great for quick repetitive tasks such as data and text input, but quickly become bothersome when trying to retouch photo’s or draw organic shapes.

I really wanted to buy the new Wacom Intuos tablet, but the hefty price tag put me off. A recent trawl around my local Curry’s looking for printer ink introduced me to a brand new offering from Wacom at a third of the price. Tablets have come a long way since I last used one. The Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch is the same spec as my old Wacom Intuos, but now comes with touch sensitive tablet. This means you can also use your fingers on the surface of the tablet just as you would on a laptop touch pad. Multi touch input means it acts just like the new generation MacBook Pro’s. If you have an iPhone you’ll like this; as you can rotate, pinch zoom, 2 finger scroll and much more. You obviously also get the pen for drawing, retouching and handwriting recognition. If you set it up properly you’d actually never need to use your keyboard for text input – simply write with the pen.

I’m loving having a tablet again. It took me a few days to get used to it again. The addition of the touch interface is what sets it apart from other tablets. It isn’t as feature rich, or powerful as the new Intuos 4, but if you’re on a budget but still need a good all round performer, you can’t go wrong.

The new site has been completely redesigned from the ground up to run on WordPress. My old site was static xhtml, and while it ran well and did what it was supposed to, I found updating content tedious and time consuming. The new system greatly streamlines my workflow and allows me to edit copy and update my work with the click of a few buttons.

I based the whole backbone on the Hybrid theme framework. This reduced development time by providing a solid skeleton and browser tested CSS rules.

New CSS3 effects are used throughout the site to round all my buttons and text input fields. This degrades gracefully for people who still use backward browsers like Internet Explorer. CSS3 will be cropping up a lot and new effects are being added that will make styling sites much easier.

Headline font substitution was handled by the WP-Cufon plugin. Cufon is a new way of rendering custom fonts in a web page without using Flash or clunky image replacement techniques.

The homepage features a Jquery image slideshow with links to my work sections. Thanks to the developer of vSlider plugin for this great little plugin.

My work galleries are still powered by SmoothGallery, although now the backend allows me to set up new galleries, sort the order, add captions and auto thumbnail my images. NextGen SmoothGallery is the plugin which makes this all possible. Other plugins allow me to link my twitter and pixelounge feeds into the footer section.

It was a steep learning curve, bending WordPress to my will. Some of the mods required patience to work out, but I got there in the end. What this experience showed me is how far WordPress can be moulded into virtually any type of site, while still keeping it’s ease of use. I’ll definitely be taking what I’ve learned and applying it to my client’s design work.

If you experience any problems with colourform, please leave a comment or contact me via the site. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

I myself had no idea what a ‘child theme’ was until I found an interesting article over at op111. I wanted to create a WordPress theme that appealed to creatives, individuals and small businesses (or even large ones), that was simple and easy on the eye. Instead of reinventing the wheel I figured I’d find an existing theme I liked and customise it.

Graph Paper Press had the exact theme I was after. It’s called Workaholic. So I signed up and downloaded the theme and got down to creating my own version. The result is a child theme – so called because it’s based on a parent theme (Workaholic in this case), which I’ve called WorkBase.

As you can see it’s really clean and well laid out and even has Twitter integration. I changed the colour scheme, graphics and some core functionality of the original theme to make it, well, much better in my opinion. By far the best change I made was integrating SmoothGallery into the theme. This replaces the rather clunky image gallery that was included. SmoothGallery is a Flash-like image slideshow viewer. Using a plugin to integrate it into the theme meant I now had a fully user editable slideshow. I also improved some of the graphic elements and gave the whole theme a classy sheen.

To find out more about WorkBase, how to get the files, installation instructions and how I can design and install a custom version of the theme for your website, simply click the button below:

UPDATE: I’m in the process of updating WorkBase. As such it won’t be available to download until I know it’s solid. Click the button above to check out the demo.