Amour Chaleur

To celebrate Christmas this season, I have launched a new layout – Zoo Mania. I wasn’t lazy this time and drew the illustration from scratch in Photoshop. Perhaps this is to make up for the previous layout where I dump everything from my old layouts together. Zoo Mania took me around 4 hours to draw the illustration and another 4 hours to code it. Did I mention how much I dislike coding layouts? Drawing is a really enjoyable process but coding is totally the opposite. The debugging process is a headache as well.

Even though you can’t see major changes in the style, I did changed the header styles. I left the comments, page navigation and footer untouched because I like it as it is now. I swear I wasn’t trying to be lazy. Before I introduce the main characters of this layout, I would like to thank Scholar for giving me constructive criticism and advice on how to improve this illustration.

Edit on 24 November: I ended up editing the minor style details like the page navigation, read more links, comments navigation and the footer etc because I feel that the previous styles didn’t really match the new theme. It’s more colourful now and looks like a new theme.

Continue reading "New layout for Christmas – Zoo Mania"

I’m still alive and kicking in case anyone though I’ve gone missing. I’m extremely slow in replying to emails these days because I’m busy catching up with my “offline” life. I faced my computer nearly 24 hours a day except when I’m in school. My dad even told me I could just get married to the computer. Of course I’m not going to do that. Chewy wouldn’t like that. Chewy came over for dinner and he waited 3 hours while I messed around with the new navigation today (yes, there’s a new design, did you not noticed it?). Hence, I promise I will spend my entire Wednesday with him!

Mini layout redesign

Speaking of the redesign, I redid both the main and footer navigation and added new panda prints to the footer. I noticed I’ve been using rounded corners for my layouts since last December and thus I removed all the round corners as well. Check out the new post meta at the end of every post if you have not. I’ve also switched to a new plugin for sharing posts and redesign (again!) the list of tags, related and popular posts. In addition, I make a small change to the background of the header, no more fluffy white clouds now and it’s a lot less cluttered. Phew! Yes, that’s all the updates I’ve in regards to the layout.

Voting for the Site Glamour Contest has closed and all the articles written by the wonderful participants have been published here. Please feel free to leave any comments or join in the discussion.

I was playing with my Photoshop the entire afternoon experimenting with typography. I have never been too bothered about the use of fonts on my website. However, I was inspired to try out something new after seeing some fantastic examples of typographical illustrations by other web designers. The Bim Bim Remix is what I’ve come up with! I’ve only changed the header so the rest of the layout looks exactly the same. I put up a poll on twitter and it’s 9 votes for Bim Bim remix and 3 votes for the previous monster layout. Sorry to all the lovers of the monster layout. Bim Bim Remix wins this round!