It’s the end of another year. Time to recharge the batteries ready to come on strong in 2011! I’ll be relaxing and keeping warm in the sub-zero temperatures. The snow is still on the ground up here in Manchester so it’ll be a white Christmas.

Check back in the New year for lots of new stuff from my creative studio, Colourform, and here at Pixelounge. I want to expand the shop to include new graphic design posters and artwork. I’ll be pushing new WordPress themes, icons and illustration projects as well.

Wishing everyone a great Christmas and happy New Year!

Antoney

WordPress 3.0 is on a stable release and the developers have ironed out any bugs by releasing 2 core updates to bring the current release to version 3.0.2.

In light of these new updates I’ve made some small updates to both my theme designs to take advantage of the new features of WordPress 3.0. These include support for the new custom menu system, which means it’s much easier to create and edit your own menu’s directly from the admin dashboard.

For those who don’t know – Workbase and ProLab are custom themes I’ve designed to appeal to designers, visual artists, photographers, bloggers or anyone looking to present their services in a well designed, easily editable way.

Both themes can be customised to suit any branding and colour scheme. Why not head over to the demo pages to see them in action:

WorkBase Theme Demo

ProLab Theme Demo

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.

Roger’s recent books are a series of historical crime novels set in St Petersburg and featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment. He wanted to evoke something of the dark, harsh times in which the novels are set. He also wanted to be able to write his blog and have it as part of the site. It was really nice to have an open brief from a fellow creative, so I set about designing a custom WordPress site that would showcase his writing and allow him to blog.

Rogernmorris is the outcome of my labour. The custom WorkBase child theme I had designed a few months ago served as the backbone. I was able to create a site that fitted in with the themes in Roger’s books, while being easily updated and maintained by Roger himself. I walked him through the admin side, and in no time he was up and running.

I’d like to thank Roger for being such an easy going client and wish him the best of luck in his writing. You can find out more about his books on the website and buy them from Amazon.

Thanks also Rog for biggin me up to your publisher Faber. One of their new writers, Alex Preston, contacted me shortly after Roger’s site went live to ask me if I could do a similar job for him. His new book, “This Bleeding City” will be published by Faber early next year. I also designed his website and blog which you can visit here.

During my research I found some truly awesome writers sites, although these tended to be ‘big money’ authors who have already sold millions of books. I did struggled to find decent, well designed sites for lessor known writers though. It is a shame that people so talented with words and language seem to have to settle for sub standard visual design for their online presence, which has become such an important part of bringing their work to a larger audience.