Posts Tagged ‘smashing magazine’

New Additions to the Design

// October 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Music, Web

I’ve made some additional modifications to the site and I’m officially calling the latest version “Notepad Mayhem v2″. Again the theme is still based on Evan Eckard’s “Notepad Chaos“, but its starting to drift pretty significantly from the original theme. I’ve got some great ideas for v3, but I need to put those on the back burner for a little while. Now on to the changes in v2.

First and foremost, I’ve added some flotsam and jetsam to the desktop to improve the overall metaphor as well as get around the three page link navigation limit. These items are:

  • Apple iPod Shuffle – Drawn using a great tutorial at Tutorial Dog. The shuffle makes for a good link to my “Music” page. In the future this page will be where I post my original creations.
  • Joe Satriani Pick – Pulled from an online music store to act as the link for my “Gear” page. This is where you can find out about my current musical gear and the kinds of things I’m doing with them.
  • WordPress Watermark – Just a little something to show my support for WordPress.
  • Red Haven Business Card – A shameless plug for my more capitalistic interests. Red Haven Internet Solutions is the umbrella for my freelance work.

A couple of the things I did behind the scenes that you may or may not have noticed was the following:

  • Replaced all of the graphical representations of the handwritten font with something cleaner and less cluttered than the original.
  • Obviously, added the code necessary to display the various items on the desk.
  • Decreased the size of the paper clip on the Recent Posts block to shift things up a bit.
  • Cleaned up all of the drop shadows on all graphical elements to make them more realistic and consistent. Made the light source consistent too.

Some of the things I’m thinking about for v3 include the following:

  • Separate the “Recent Posts” graphics from the notebook and make independent of the page background.
  • Create a “Clipped Coupon” wrapper for Google AdSense code in the sidebar.
  • Create an “Address Book” themed wrapper for Links in the sidebar.
  • Widgetize the sidebar and create custom widgets for Recent Posts, Categories, Tags, Calendar, Links, etc.
  • Create an “About” page template with a polaroid template for the author, space for themed social network chiclets
  • Create a generic page templates with the same home sidebar, different sidebar, and no sidebar.
  • Create an “Archives” page template with posts by tags, categories, date, comments, popularity
  • Multiple background options
  • Exhaustive code cleanup and optimizations
  • Create standard sized “Zones” for the items on the desk to make customization easier

I think if I can manage to accomplish all of those things for v3, I’ll consider asking Smashing Magazine and Evan Eckard if I can provide the theme for free. That being said, I probably wont get to work on those changes much until the new year.

TheFarlands.Net Facelift

// August 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // Web

I have recently completed the customization of a new theme for my family blog, TheFarlands.Net. The site features a colorful new theme from the folks at Smashing Magazine and was originally designed by Maleika Attawel. I didn’t do all that much in the way of modifications other than to remove the custom field driven thumbnails (they didn’t work particularly well), replace the cartoon character (very cool, but just didn’t fit the intended use), and change out the menu buttons. I also changed the mailbox to point to a contact form page, rather than simply embedding an email address for every one to spam.

Notepad Mayhem

// August 25th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Web

When I selected the ‘Notepad Chaos‘ theme (by Evan Eckard) for dandyman.us, I knew that the background had to go. What I didn’t realize was just how daunting of a task that would be. You see the original theme used some really huge images, very little transparency, and most of those images were not easily customized.

The first problem I encountered was the way in which the background was constructed. Rather than using transparency on many of the images, Evan simply cut the graphics from the PSD file with the background still behind them. This can be a minor pain in the ass if your goal is to modify the theme to use a tiled background. In the end, I had to recreate a number of the images as PNGs (I hate GIFs) with transparency. While this can pose problems with IE6 and some other older browsers, I really don’t care. On this site, IE6 is dead.

Issue number two was that the design featured a monumentally large background image on the entire top half of the page. The search box, navigation post-its, title block, recent posts, about 1/3 of the notebook and the entire background from there up were all one image. Other than completely screwing up my vision of a tiled background it made the load time a little sluggish. The first order of business was carving up that giant image in to smaller, more manageable pieces. I created all new sub-images and modified the layout to free the various elements from each other. The end result, being that the layout and overall design is much more flexible.
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Blank Sheet of Paper

// August 21st, 2008 // No Comments » // Web

Just the other day, I said to myself, “Self, I think its time for a fresh, new start on dandyman.us.” So I started with a clean new install of WordPress and started looking for a fresh, new theme to build the new and improved dandyman.us. Now, I freely admit that completely nuking the site and starting from a completely blank slate was a bit drastic, but I really wanted to shake things up and head in a new direction.

The new theme is a beautiful theme developed by Evan Eckard for (and released by) Smashing Magazine. Now, I immediately loved the look of the theme, but just could not get over the default background. Seeing as the design was centered around the whole notebook metaphor, I opted to change out the background for the cliche, but classic wood desktop. I’ll probably add additional graphical elements over time, but for now I’m keeping it simple. I’m not sure how long this particular theme will last, but I learned a lot dissecting it and changing out some of the graphical elements.