Holy Cow! It has been a long time since I’ve written any new posts on the site. I don’t know if any of you are still out there, but if you are I’m sorry it’s been so long. I know we all get busy and have a hard time finding the necessary time to write new posts, but I’ve been SUPER BUSY! The blog design/development business has really taken off and I have a lot of finished projects to add to the portfolio and a lot to show off. I have been working on a lot of projects simultaneously, and two of them are fairly close to 100% completion…but I’m not ready to close the book on them quite yet.

My latest project just finished up today, and I must say it is a huge improvement over the previous design. The sports blogging community has been kind to GrandmasterB and in turn, I have been turning out some of my best design work. Jesse from PistonsNationBlog.com contacted me around mid-June to work on a new theme design for his site. Before I go much further, I must mention that this theme is not a GrandmasterB original. Jesse purchased a template theme called “Bright” from ThemeForest.net and I added some of my flair to the design to incorporate his new logo and color scheme.

(more…)

Last week I received an email from a friend about this cat named ‘Johnny Cupcakes’ and that he was going to be speaking at Colorado State University at the Lory Student Center. My initial reaction was “what the hell is Johnny Cupcakes?”; I thought it was another cupcake bakery owner that had gotten famous, but I was way off. After reading the article regarding this mysterious ‘Johnny Cupcakes’ I was intrigued and had to do more research. My only regret after reading the story was that CSU was a good hour and a half from my office and there was no way I could make it in time to hear him speak.

(more…)

The crew from Go Media are at it again as they just released their 13th collection of “stock” vector artwork. I use the word “stock” lightly, because their work is anything but! This latest release is chock full of great stuff and includes a total of 137 high quality, detailed vector pieces in seven individual themes. As always you can purchase the entire collection for set 13 or choose to purchase them in their individual packs, but you’ll pay almost $34 more if you were to purchase all seven packs separately. This set includes some very interesting stuff; I’m very interested to see the “Flow” pack in action as it’s got some really cool geometric shapes in flowing patterns…very cool stuff.

I’m not 100% sold on the 3D Skull collection, but I’m guessing with some tweaking and some experimentation they could be used very cleverly to create some cool artwork. The entire set has some really cool stuff in it which includes:

• 3D Skulls (mentioned)
• Robots
• Bound (Vines, Ropes, etc)
• Flow (mentioned)
• Too Sexy (sexy silhouettes – also seen on “Speed Network”)
• XTreme Sports
• Apparel

(more…)

In my Week in Review post for October 20th, I mentioned that I had been working on a “secret” project for a client of mine and that we would probably be launching the site on or around November 3rd. Unfortunately, we didn’t make our November 3rd launch…but November 11th is just as good. The project as you might be able to tell was a redesign of Cuzoogle. Cuzzy had been talking about redesigning his site for awhile now and giving it a more updated look. We both sat down (cross-continent) and came up with an interesting layout that would allow for him to put in his necessary ad spots as well as something that looked fan-freakin’tastic!

While this project wasn’t a completely custom theme; we did start off with the basic layout from the Simple Red Theme from Easy Wordpress that Cuzzy had been using. The biggest challenge in getting everything looking as it should were the widgets that Cuzzy uses for advertising. They took some tweaking, but they all fell into place like they should. The new theme is in between Evolutionary and Revolutionary when it comes down to it. Since the original theme had a lot of good quality stuff already built-in, we didn’t need to revolutionize the theme…however, the design elements added were HUGE improvements over the old version.

This is a quick breakdown of all of the new added features… (more…)

Jeff Finley and his band of designers have just released their latest series of vector artwork…Vector Pack 12. This series is definitely a bit more dark and graphic than past releases. As a brand, Go Media is definitely pushing themselves to become the leader when it comes to providing great artwork resources. The level of detail in this recent release is simply amazing. If you’re into dark and horrific imagery, you need to look no further than the Zombies and the Guts packs.

I could be wrong, but this has got to be the largest release to date from Go Media. I’ve counted up a grand total of 190 graphic elements in this release. If you take the value of purchasing the entire package at $34.90 that winds up being only 18 cents per element…that’s a great deal! All in all seven individually themed packs:

• 8-Bit Pixel Art
• Zombies
• Guts & Slime
• Tiling Halftones
• East Asian Folk Art
• Linework 2
• Tattered Scrolls

If you’re a design like myself, or just like collecting great resources for your library you should stop by and check out what Go Media has to offer. If you want to check out what you can do with the vector elements check out my Grunge Styled Banner Tutorial. Also, look for more tutorials from GrandmasterB to be coming up later this month. Subscribe to The Feed so you don’t miss out.

~ GrandmasterB