Amour Chaleur

I’ve been so engrossed with fixing this layout that for the first time in weeks, I slept at nearly 4am. I decided a new layout is necessary not because I was bored of the previous one but because I think I need something new to “freshen up” the entire site. This blog hasn’t been very active lately because most of my time had been spent on last minute revisions for the upcoming examinations. I had a few other ideas for the new layout but the “Candy House” idea was my final pick.

New icons

Frequent visitors of my blog would know that I usually don’t change any of the comments design because I’m always at a lack of ideas (okay, I admit I’m lazy). This design is one of the simpler ones without much details. I didn’t have much time on hand to work on this. The entire layout took me about 6 hours and I didn’t do any detailed cross browsers checks either. I did a quick check in Opera, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. It seems all right hence if you notice any issues, please let me know.

Panda King

Regarding this design, I have to admit I’m not a fan of candies or chocolates. Anything sweet is not exactly my cup of tea¹. However, I thought a candy house seems pretty interesting and I’m pretty sure it’s a cosy place to live in. This design is made from lollipops, colourful chocolate M&Ms, strawberries and chocolate sticks, vanilla cream, lots of melted chocolates and my trademark, panda king. No pandas were harm in the process of making this layout. I hope you like it because it’s going to stay till at least April or June.

I’ve also been thinking of ideas for my blogger’s namecard. It’s been on my list of to-do for the past year but I still haven’t started yet. Perhaps I should start jotting down my ideas. What do you think of using this candy design for the namecard? Oh and if both of you are reading this, Terry and Brenda, both of you need to start too! I want one when you are done, okay?

1. I don’t think pandas like sweet stuff as well [«]

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 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!