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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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Lately, I’ve been spending more time looking around the web for resources for creating custom graphic elements. Today I found a really cool site that will allow you to create your own customized tiled background, and then download the image to be used on your website. Generally, I’m not a big fan of tiled backgrounds for anything. However, after messing around with the dynamic design tool on BGPatterns.com I’m having second thoughts. This is really a cool tool and creates some very cool backgrounds!
Another great feature is that once you have created something you like; not only can you download that image, but you can also save it and share it in the pattern gallery. I created a quick pattern using the traditional GrandmasterB blue color scheme, and added it below if you want to download it. I don’t think we will be seeing many tiled backgrounds by GrandmasterB any time soon, but you might be surprised.
~ GrandmasterB
