“Lake”, a new design for Sandvox, is almost ready. I’m working now on the boring part (site update, promo images, demo site and so on… very very boring… I’m definitely not a marketing guy). It should be released probably on next Monday.

Just for my blog readers, here’s a sneak peek.

See you all in few days!

After my looooong sleep and a great lack of inspiration, I know now how my next design will look like and I can work on it. Since most CSS is already done (again, it’s a port from a previous Wordpress theme not released to the public), I think that the developement will go pretty fast.

It will be a clean, monocolor theme, with blue as the default main color for background and links (I still have to decide if to offer color variations and, if so, how many). It will be particularly suitable for blogs and/or long text pages because of its good readability.

Not so original, maybe, but I decided to keep it simple: I needed something easy to start back, I was postponing too much. Morevore, simple themes are always the most appreciated.

If everything goes fine, I think it will be tested and available within a week, so stay tuned!

(And after that, there will be some announcement about the Rabbit’s Facebook page)

[photo: Tambako the Jaguar]

Orange Rabbit’s update was the last thing I had to do before I could proceed to something else. Now I have to decide what’s next – and it’s a tough choice…

These are my possibilities:

• Go on with my iPhone programming training and loose my brian in the hopeless effort to build the final iPhone App, the one that will get me rich forever and proceed to my next step: rule the world (experience earned: high if I actually learn something not forgetting it after a week; results: let’s be honest: low!; time spent: a lot; money earned: probably none)
• Port Grafite to RapidWeaver (experience earned: low; results: maybe very good; time spent: some; money earned: some)
• Keep messing with BuddyPress and change one of the websites I manage to a social network (experience earned: high; results: good; time spent: tend to infinite; money earned: zero or probably a negative amount and, moreover, tens of users to train)
• Create a new Sandvox Design (experience earned: none; results: not predictable; time spent: not so much; money earned: should be fine; inspiration: none at all!)
• Install my second blog (experience earned: none; results: useless but maybe fun; time spent: not so much; money earned: none)

As you can see, I have many options and a scarce imagination… I just hope not to go on with all of these options altogether… In that case please, someone call my doctor

Before I start new projects it’s important to keep up-to-date all of my themes. This little update to Orange Rabbit was long awaited and finally I decided to release it.

It’s just a new design for navigation arrows: they were orange but, obviously, if you change the color of your page with Sandvox Pro (instructions here) orange may not fit well. So they are now grey (the shape changed too, in my opinion it’s better now).

Here we are! A new version of Grafite is finally out and it sports a bonus new design: Grafite Mini.

What’s new: first of all, bordered/unbordered pagelets for sidebar too; then, movie pages now have the same look as photo pages; and if you use a sidebar, it’s because you want a page to look like the other ones, so now photo pages with a sidebar are just as the other pages in your website.

Moreover, with Grafite comes now a new design called Grafite Mini: do you like the look of photo pages in Grafite? Grafite Mini has this look in every page. This design is a good choice if your website:

• doesn’t need a blog (you can have it but it’s not so good looking)
• doesn’t need a sidebar (you can have it but it’s ugly)
• doesn’t need a header or a custom logo (you can’t see it)
• in few words: is just a gallery or a collection of galleries (movie or photos) with just some text (but not too much).

If you need a more complex website maybe you will still prefer Grafite, but if you want something really simple and completely focused on images Grafite Mini is better.

Before you upgrade please consider that Grafite 1.0 didn’t support bordered pagelets for the sidebar, so after the upgrade your sidebar pagelets may look different. If you want them to be light gray, you have to change their settings manually.

I want to say thank you to all the customers that sent me feedback, suggestions and requests, helping me in what I think is a good improvement.

Don’t forget to send your website’s URL to Sandvox Sites!

After a long, long pause, I’m back at work. My first goal is to update a few themes, starting with Grafite and Orange Rabbit. The former is ready for some beta testing, so I think it will be released in a couple of days.

Grafite for Sandvox will be updated soon (to version 1.1). If you have feature requests, this is the right time to send them (or add a comment to this post)!

This is what is planned so far:

• Print style sheet
• Bordered sidebar pagelets
• Some fancy styling for “strong” tags
• Code optimization, if possible, to enhance code injection possibilities

I’m leaving for a trip to London, where I hope to spend a good time and relax.

For this reason, no support is guaranteed till I come back to Rome later next week. In December everything will be as usual and hopefully I’ll be back working on some new theme.

See you in few days!

If you haven’t got Sandvox already, check this page and get a 20% off the price (and the same applies to dozens of other applications).

It’s a good chance to start with Sandvox!

Just 4 days left…

A lot of work these days to totally redesign my personal web pages. My previous website wasn’t organized, was mainly in italian and moreover it was a subfolder of another site, one of my (too) many projects.

I moved the new one to its own domain (it’s the first time I use the “.me” suffix).

About the code: I gave up with javascript frameworks (I initially thought about a mootools or JQuery effect for the top navigation menu) and with a custom @font-face: Cantarell, my first choice, looks great on Mac and I decided to implement this CSS3 function, but it’s ugly on Firefox for Windows (at least in Parallels). So I kept it simple: dynamic html with few php scripts.

For the graphics I must credit the “About me” pages of Khoi Vinh and Grace Smith as the source of my inspiration (well, even more than just an inspiration). As usual, Smashing Magazine has been a precious resource when I was struggling with indecision. Even if you’re not a designer, keep an eye on SM: you’ll find there a lot of useful information.