Let’s get this party started off right and announce the winner of the caption contest and the $25 Best Buy Gift Card. Congratulations goes out to the commenter known as Red Spider for his clever caption. I will be emailing him shortly to inform him of the news and get his gift card in the mail. The caption contest was a huge success and got twenty comments from readers. I am thinking about making this a regular feature on the site, so if you liked participating and want to win a prize check back often or subscribe to the RSS Feed to keep up on what’s going on at GrandmasterB dot com.

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What’s that old adage? When it rains it pours. Well, in my case it’s pouring…pouring design jobs. GrandmasterB has become extremely busy over the past week with new design projects coming through the door. Shortly after the release of last week’s review post, I was hired to design the header you see above for the popular French basketball forums Basket4Life. Antoine has been great to work with and I definitely appreciate his business. I am currently working on another design for his header as well, that has a little more “urban” feel to the font. I’m thinking about digging into the Go Vandal font for this one.

I am also hard at work on another client project; however, he has asked me to keep it a secret until it’s ready to lauch…so we’ll have to wait to release any news regarding that project. You won’t have to wait too long though, as we’re scheduling the launch for next week (November 3rd).

All of this work is really great and I’m loving all of the feedback that I’m receiving. Jeff and I are trying to utilize the little bit of free time we have to get our website (BlogFixers.com) online too. That’s the drawback to having tons of work to do…no time for the personal projects. Speaking of personal projects, I had been hinting about a secret project for awhile now that I’d been working on. I wanted to have it launched by November 1st, but with all of the other projects going on it’s been pushed back to at least January 1, 2009. I have tried to figure out a way to get it done, but client work comes first. I’ll probably keep working at it here and there when time permits; however, I don’t want to rush it (or client work) just to get it done.

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This past week I spent more time designing than I did writing up new content for the blog, but I figured that both activities lend to the overall success of the GMB Network. I received a heads up from my boy Cuzzy that Kellex (The Sports Dollar) was starting a new blog (Blaze of Love) and wanted a killer header designed by yours truly. I immediately contacted Kellex to discuss the project and after receiving some preliminary ideas from him I went straight to work.

The overall look for the header and the logo was based on the logo from the VH1 Series “The Rock of Love“. I did a little research and jotted down some ideas, and within an hour or two came up with the final product you see above. I wasn’t too big on the idea of hearts in the image, but roses had to be in the design since Portland is the “City of Roses” and the arena is called the Rose Garden. The scroll/banner is actually a free download from the T-Shirt Factory vector sets, and I think it fit in perfectly with the design. I was also able to find suitable pieces to use from the Go Media Arsenal as well for this project.

I want to thank Kellex for giving me the opportunity to design this header for his new site, and thanks to Cuzzy for spreading the word about GrandmasterB’s Design Services. Be sure to check out the site in the weeks to come as I’ve got some hot new content in development that you won’t want to miss.

~ GrandmasterB

Another week is in the books, can you believe that it’s almost mid-October already? Last week I put the finishing touches on the first project that Jeff and I collaborated on. Mike Hayes commissioned Jeff and I to create a custom designed theme for WordPress and migrate his existing Blogger site over to the new domain: SteadyBurn dot net. The design process was interesting, because Jeff and I didn’t know a whole lot about Mike or hist existing blog. Through some research and tweaking we were able to come up with a unique look that Mike was very happy with.

The theme has some cool design elements that were implemented to improve the visitors experience as well. I had read a tutorial on CSS-Tricks awhile back that would allow you to add some flare to your date badges, and implement a comment bubble to the top corner that displays the total comments on the post. It’s a very easy trick to implement into your design. I did change up the date badge a bit to make it fit the color scheme of the site. The original tutorial uses a different color for each month, but it looked a bit cartoony for this design.

Another cool element of the design are the transparent content boxes. If you look closely you can see the background carries into the left column box. It took some tweaking to get it to look right and not take away from the content, but it turned out great! Overall, this project was a lot of fun to do and in the end Mike was very happy with the design…which is what matters the most.

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It is hard to believe that the month of September is over (well…over tomorrow). Where does the time go? It seems that all of my time has been spent at work or in front of the computer at the house. I have recently partnered up with Jeff (BuzzMyBlog.com and BuzzPirates.com) to provide my services along with Jeff’s programming experience to a broader audience.

We are still working on setting up our online presence (ie. domain name, business plan, etc.); however, we are open for business and bidding on multiple projects.  So please, let us know if you or anyone you know needs some help with custom software, a website, a widget, a plugin, a gadget, an app, a blog, or even an enterprise scale Content Management System. We can do it all…and we are happy to pay referral fees. I would like to give a special “shout out” to Cuzzy for referring our first few clients. Thanks Cuzzy!

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