Miralize v9 : Merry Christmas

Hey folks, hope you’re all having great holidays. I definitely am, especially now that Miralize version 9 is released. Yes, the same “Miralize v9″ that I’ve been tweeting about since late September. And the same one I have posted images about. The reason for the extremely long delay was because of college, and the business with others.

New Design…. Again

Yes sadly, my Macbook has shed light on a very visible design flaw in most of my designs, until now that is. I’ve been accidentally using Color Management in Photoshop, and that renders the colours differently on OSX. And I’ve been doing this for years. There should be a very big warning when starting Photoshop to stop idiots like me from doing this. And to think, if I hadn’t switched OS’, it might have been years until I had realized the mistakes I have been making, I might have missed out on important clients, lost grades in college, and considered generally to be the worst designer of the 21st Century.

But today I unveiled version 9.. yes version 9 of my not-so-popular website/blog/portfolio. 9 designs in the space of 9 months. That has to be some kind of record, no? And if it isn’t , it should be. People say that a designers worst client is themselves, they are never happy with their site looks. But I think this one has potential.

Dark and Dirty. The icons are not mine, but from two free icon sets from Function, and while they are fantastic, they dont go very well. I like the form of the icons, but they are too varied and I really wanted some consistency. I may ask them to develop some, once I have failed miserably in Illustrator.

I’ve added a lot of functionality into this one, some of which were evident in my previous design iteration. Things like the auto-incrementing Twitter followers number in the sidebar, the links at the bottom of this post that post to Twitter, Facebook etc.. really adds some interaction to the site, which I want. Unlike utterly generic web 2.0107868689769 crap that looks out of place, but is seen on over a million blogs.

I’ve finally gotten to the stage where I can pretty much do the design I want, usually I would do something in Photoshop, but be too worried that it would be impossible to replicate in a Browser. Also I’m pretty proud that I did this solely on a new machine, a machine which I have so much to learn still. I used Coda for the first time too, and honestly it is without a doubt the best text editor I have ever used.

Overall, am I happy with this design? Sure. Do I think I could improve it? Definitely. Does this mean that I wont change it drastically in under a month? Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Quick Tip #1 – Clearing Floats without extra Tags

This is going to be my first CSS snippet. I am going to post a series of both symantic and useful CSS tips. These will be good for both beginners and people who might know CSS already, but are looking for more efficient ways of handling their code. My first tip will be a very useful method of clearing floats in CSS only, without the need for excessive xHTML tags.

Design a WordPress 2.7 Theme – Day 3 : Dynamic Sidebar and Functional Footer

Introduction

Although the main content is always the most important part of a web design, the secondary content plays a fundamental role in guiding the user through the website. The sidebar helps direct the flow of the page, gives it useful information, and can display some of the most important aspects of your website.

Seeing as these tutorials are based off of WordPress 2.7, there is no need to go into detail about static sidebars. You can easily add these in, with your knowledge of XHTML and the use of the very detailed WordPress Codex.

Footers are also a very important feature of your site. Because they are at the bottom, they are often overlooked. Many people don’t realise how important it is to have something to look at once you finish reading a post and so the footer is an ideal opportunity to maintain readership.

Design a WordPress 2.7 Theme – Day 1 : Structure and Heading

Introduction

The first thing to consider when designing a WordPress theme is to think about the layout of site. Who is it for, why do they need it, how many columns, what colours? For this tutorial, I will be working on something to give away for free on this site ( a sort of follow-up to the series). I cant decide on your design, so you will have to get all of these beforehand.