I just did a cool shoot for Australian clothing label Aprils Chance. To quote their slogan, “when the reality of the everyday is all a dream… we are Aprils Chance”. Wearing the new ‘Voodoo Skulls’ tee which you can pickup from their website and find them on Facebook. Booyah!
Via @Behance
Via @Behance.net
via @TheCoolist
I see a lot of discussion on web design forums and blogs about the trend in modern web design for designers to simply modify ‘Premium’ WordPress themes and charge a reduced rate for the service, compared to designing a site from scratch. The argument is that this trend will keep the rates we can charge for custom design too cheap and keep the premium theme companies loaded. On the latter I agree, but I feel this trend is only going to get more popular and in fact it’s allowed small/medium business and people wanting personal sites to be able to afford cool looking websites with great functionality that was never before possible on a budget; it might have even helped ‘beautify’ the web a little more as most of these ‘Premium’ themes don’t look too bad straight out of the box.
I’m all for this trend, and good-on the premium theme companies for creating a new marketplace that basically didn’t exist 2-3 years ago (you should gladly reap the benefits, as you are the ones actually building the themes from scratch and doing the support) but I think it’s important designers do their best to make their modifications really stand out and different from the original themes in the interest of keeping the web diversified. I also believe there is still a place to earn a decent living as a designer through custom premium theme modifications – if you can explain to the client exactly the changes you have made and can show some initiative on improving the functionality of the theme in some aspects, then why can’t you charge a 1/3 price to building a site from scratch and be able to build 3 sites in the time it takes to design one from scratch; thus earning the same income?
For the past 6-months I have been working as an affiliated ‘Woo Worker’ with the well known WordPress Theme company, WooThemes. As a Woo Worker I provide custom theme modifications and tweaks, site styling and graphical work for those who’ve purchased a theme from WooThemes. This week I was interviewed by Adii as part of an ongoing series of interviews with the other WooThemes workers. You can read a transcript of the entire interview by ‘reading more’ of this article or head on over to the WooThemes blog to read the full interview and post a comment.
Continue Reading →
On a recent project I just finished I got to try out the Arthemia Premium theme and here is what I came up with: www.followthewinds.com. I had quite a few emails from people asking me how I got the flash animation working in the Headline section. Funnily enough, I saw the script on someone else’s website and figured out how to do it myself.
Unfortunately, its not a free script; it’s “paid” and will set you back US$15 from FlashDen:
http://www.flashden.net/item/accordion-v1-xml/4332
You can get other similar scripts for free but they’re not as complete and usually haven’t got the .xml file attached which will let you very easily add text to the images and assign the right pictures without editing the original flash files (.swf/.fla) themselves.
This script was a little tricky to get to work in because (my copy at least) didn’t come with any decent instructions and it wasn’t apparent where all the files needed to be sitting in your header.php and in your source folder. Anyhow, I worked it out after all the emails I received from others asking how I did this, I decided I’ll put a quick tutorial together on how you can put it in the Arthemia theme.
Continue Reading →