Lake Sandvox Design now comes with a second, “greyish” design whose name is “Lake (Graphite)”. I fixed a couple of bugs too.
Of course, the new design is included in the Summer Pack too.
With (well deserved!) holidays approaching (just ten more days and I will be at the seaside), I leave you for this summer with an interesting offer for first-time customers: all Sandvox Designs for $29 instead of $54.
You save 25 dollars, so it could be an opportunity to get all the collection even if you already have one of two of them.
The Summer Pack 2010 special offer ends on August 31st.
Orange Rabbit sports a default orange color for header and links, but you can change it to whatever you want. With few lines of code, you can have as many different versions of this design as your fantasy can imagine.
Moreover, you can even differentiate single pages within the same website, grouping them into different sections that your visitor will immediately recognize.
This is how (you need a “Pro” licence of Sandvox): – Read more »
Few months ago I received a support request for Grafite, and I shared some css code to tweak the theme a little bit. The results were good, but still my customer didn’t get what she was looking for exactly.
Most of the times, if use Sandvox, you know that you have boundaries you can’t cross and you’re ready to accept this. But from time to time some requests seem very logical and make me think: “Oh, I should have done this”.
In these cases, I like the challenge and if I’m allowed by my schedule I tweak the design itself and send a private, customized version to my customer (don’t rely on it, it happens quite rarely!). Change after change, checking the results not only on my test websites but also on my customer’s one, I ended up with a totally new scheme which eventually became Grafite Mini.
Well, StudioMacbeth is finally online, so thank you Maria and congratulations! I’m happy we can now share the credit.
As you probably know, a well-formatted web page should use only some specific fonts and this is because the web designer has to be sure that the font used is available on the visitor’s computer. If you create a page and choose “Arial” for your text, your visitor will see that page more or less the same way you see it, because Arial is installed on (almost) any computer.
While many elements of the page (colors, boxes, margins, font sizes and so on) are created by the browser following the instructions found in the css file, to display a specific font family the browser has to ask the OS, because neither it nor the css file have any information on how to draw, for example, an “A” using Times New Roman or Arial: for them an “A” is just an “A”. – Read more »
If you put a picture into a text field, Sandvox gives you three options:
Unfortunately, Sandvox decides if the image has to be aligned on the left side or on the right side of the page.
Actually it’s not Sandvox, is the designer of that specific theme: if you switch theme, you’ll see how each design has its own setting. This choice is made for you and usually is the most appropriated to mantain a good balance in the graphics of your website.
For example, Carbone aligns the floating images to the right side of the page: – Read more »
Here we are: Lake, a brand new Sandvox Design with a wide layout (it’s time to move to 960px, folks!).
Again, it’s inspired by one of my previous themes, and precisely the one I used for years for one of my own websites (Asterione, in italian, running on WordPress).
During almost three years, I had a lot of time to fine-tune typography and whitespace to reach a good balance between some color and a good readability. Moreover, Asterione contains a lot of text, so readability and a relaxing experience for the visitor were really main goals. All the feedback I received was quite good, so I think that Sandvox users will enjoy it as I do.
I created two color variations (green and pink) but they were too bright and, for now, I’m not including them. Maybe I’ll add some extra later, as a free upgrade.
What else? Banner-ready (960×128), Logo-ready, bordered pagelets, the usual stuff.
“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 over, 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]
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).