WordPress Blue » Design Resources

Jean-Baptiste Jung/CatsWhoCode.com: 80 ways to improve blog sidebars

admin — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:24:40 +0000

As I wrestle with each WordPress problem, I’ve increasingly found myself at CatsWhoCode, the creation of Jean-Baptiste Jung, who is also responsible for WPRecipes.com. You can also see his portfolio here. In the meantime, if you’re trying solve the mysteries of the WP Sidebar, check out 8 excellent resources to enhance your WordPress sidebar. Why did I say 80, and not 8? Because the eighth item is a link to another post with 73 tips about the about the WP sidebar.

The cats who preside over our house certainly like to interact with the keyboard, but they walk back and forth, they lie down, but they never seem to close tags or care about the user experience. They scoff at SEO. I guess Jean-Baptiste has better-trained cats.

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SpeckyBoy: 10 free snippet control apps

admin — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 01:42:19 +0000

I’ve been using all manner of apps – from OneNote, to NotePad (and various substitutes), to index cards, to keep track of passwords, logins, and bits of code that I use all the time. SpeckyBoy – a site which is a cornucopia of resources for novices and serious coders and everyone in between – has 10 Free Desktop Applications for Managing Your Code Snippets.

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5 Best Offline WordPress Editors For Your Blog

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:15:47 +0000

Even with a good connection, with an excellent connection, when composing a WordPress post, it’s easy to trip over your own edits when backspace/delete, insert, cp,,pm functions whic hap0pen instantaneously on a local machine can tqake a while while waiting for the edit happe.on the remote server and refreshes in the New/Edit post windows in WordPress. If you’re like me, which is to say immature and impatient, you’re editing a page which doesn’t even reflect current data. It’s easy, then, to be deleting data which has already been deleted on the server, but which is still visible on your client machine. This creates a frustrating queue of commands which require – in user terms - a long wait to resolve while you’re ready to compose the next phrase.

Hence – an offline editor makes sense. How that works with one’s theme and layout – a slightly more complicated question. But at least one can get copy formatted for insertion into the WP Post Editor more quickly offline.

Word processors – MS Word, OpenOffice, of course can save files as html. But a dedicated offline blogging tool might be easier to fine-tune for a particular blog theme. In the course of looking, I found this outstanding post 5 Best Offline WordPress Editor For Your Blog.

And – under the heading of finding treasure while searching for everyday tools, I found the post on EdwardKhoo.com. This is an outstanding blog – lots of helpful how-to posts about irritating problems not otherwise widely addressed.

The blog itself is an outstanding implementation of Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo Theme, available on ProThemeDesign, where one can find the work not only of Darren Hoyt, but also of the brilliant Ben Gillbanks. Check out their new theme ByLine.

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Proof Branding: brilliant use of multiple metaphors and logotypes in branding

jonathansoroko — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 01:57:57 +0000

At Proof Branding, a really thoughtful, clever group of people use the metaphors of “proof” (as in scientific evidence), and “proof,” as in the measure of ethanol in a beverage containing ethanol – itself a metaphor and idiom indicating “strength” and “purity” – and some really beautiful graphics and text to make a great impression. Here’s the image that got me first (they’re on the list of recommended designers at DIYThemes, the home of the Thesis WP theme, which is sometimes the theme in use here, and also in use on some of my other WP installations):

Again – the laboratory glassware could be part of a scientific experiment – an informal distillery – or both. Ambiguity is fine as long as all of the meanings are intended.

The Proof Branding team also maintain a well-worth reading blog, have some pretty cool titles (see their “About” page), and manage to project a lot of confidence without a trace of pretension. Since I’ve spend most of my professional life nosing around fraudsters and con artists – one of my working hypotheses is that the fakers always hit one or both parts of that equation (confidence, pretension) with a false note.

We must note one disturbing tell-tale: like one other well-known designer who many suspect is actually just fronting for the actual work of his own dog – one of the named creative leaders at Proof Branding well, from the client’s point of view, it’s the work that matters, and any dog that good at site design – well, it’s hard to imagine a dog designing a website who didn’t want to.

Proof Branding’s portfolio – and every page on their site – will be well worth your time, and because it’s so good I can easily get a dozen blog posts out of it and look excellent merely by virtue of my good taste, I’m just going to close with a screen grab from their Services | “What We Do” page:

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Marc Carson – openoffice flowchart template

jonathansoroko — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 09:00:34 +0000

I use OpenOffice more and more, although I’ve been slow to master OpenOffice Draw. In my blogging, and in other work, I often think in visual terms, but don’t necessarily have the skills to make it happen. To be more truthful, I don’t have the skills. And for its many strengths, there aren’t that many easily available OpenOffice templates worth working from.

Enter Marc Carson, a designer from Ukiah, California. He’s released into the wild a flow chart template for OpenOffice Draw.

Excerpted from Marc’s comments:

Flowcharts are a powerful tool for organizing your thoughts. They can help you avoid procrastination or blocks in your workflow by clearly showing the next steps forward, accompanied by solutions for any questions that come up.

I use flowcharts all the time in my own work, especially when I’m confronted with a big project that has lots of variables.

The default OpenOffice graphics are really, really bad. So this is my contribution back to the community.

Marc Carson’s post on his OO template.

Further Resources:

downloads and more information on OpenOffice Draw here.
don’t miss Marc Carson’s portfolio

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WeAreAGoodCompany.com (they are)/League of Movable Type

jonathansoroko — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 02:43:02 +0000

A Good Company, also known as “We Are A Good Company,” is that indeed. Came across them through their project League of Movable Type, because I was looking for their font League Gothic. The always amazing Randa Clay used League Gothic in a header logo/wordmark thatshe designed for my primaryweb project, Popular Logistics. A Good Company has many projects going other than the League of Movable Type, but for the moment we’ll stick with that, because it deserves some attention.

Popular Logistics header image by Randa Clay

Check out their A Good Portfolio project, and:

Lettercase (in, or moving into, beta)
SidePaths – which has, I think, immense implications to do good stuff (and prevent bad stuff)

And there’s more. It’s all good, and it’s worth your time.

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For those facing the same problem, I recommend 8 Handy WordPress Plugins For Font Lovers from WebDesignBooth.

Sources of inspiration/problem-solving resources

jonathansoroko — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 10:46:29 +0000

By their nature – reverse-chronological order – blogs favor fresh information. But since they’re searchable, internally or externally (via search engi.ne, for example) they become de facto “content management systems.” I’m in the middle of starting a nonprofit, thinking about logo and identity, and found myself – once more – reading a Randa Clay post from 2007, Design Inspiration: 6 Outstanding Logo Sites.

The post is still entirely helpful – but also check out Randa’s redesign of her own site, to my eye strongly reminiscent of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

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Hongkiat.com – an outstanding resource

jonathansoroko — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 19:41:58 +0000

There’s no “about” page, so I’m not sure if Hongkiat is one person, or many, but when Hongkiat tries to illuminate a problem, it does so with great thoroughness. Some examples:

A recent article on data visualization Data Visualization with CSS: Graphs, Charts and More includes, by my count, 29 examples – each with a link to a site which explains the technique;
a piece on HTML Table Building has more than 30 examples/resources;
Two pages (of excerpts) listing free icon sets;
Image search? Check out 41 Image and Icon Search Engines Designers Should Know (I was familar with six)
100 Alternative Search Engines You Should Know (most organized by file type)

My primary search engine has become Deeper Web, which adds other searches to a Google search. But if you know what you’re looking for, or the noise-to-signal ratio is too high, a specialized search engine is a good thing.But – my quibbling on that point aside – Hongkiat is a powerful toolset.

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Blind Text Generator

jonathansoroko — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 01:24:24 +0000

Callout Title

The body of your callout goes here.

">Blind Text Generator will generate Lorem Ipsum for you – and what’s more, lets you pick Cicero in English or Latin, use Kafka, Werther, or other more gibberish-like formats, and will let you precisely select number of words, paragraphs, and even fonts. So – here’s a quick example

The quick, brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog. Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps. Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymphs. Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex! Fox nymphs grab quick-jived waltz. Brick quiz whangs jumpy veldt fox. Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack. Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim. Quick zephyrs blow, vexing daft Jim. Sex-charged fop blew my junk TV quiz. How quickly daft jumping zebras vex. Two driven jocks help fax my big quiz. Quick, Baz, get my woven flax jodhpurs! “Now fax quiz Jack! ” my brave ghost pled. Five quacking zephyrs jolt my wax bed. Flummoxed by job, kvetching W. zaps Iraq. Cozy sphinx waves quart jug of bad milk. A very bad quack might jinx zippy fowls. Few quips galvanized the mock jury box. Quick brown dogs jump over the lazy fox. The jay, pig, fox, zebra, and my wolves quack! Blowzy red vixens fight for a quick jump. Joaquin Phoenix was gazed by MTV for luck. A wizard’s job is to vex chumps quickly in fog. Watch “Jeopardy! “, Alex Trebek’s fun TV quiz game. Woven silk pyjamas exchanged for blue quartz.

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18 sites to kickstart logo design from OpenJason – plus much more

jonathansoroko — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:03:49 +0000

18 Sites to help you create your logo from OpenJason, a developer, who, when he lists, he rules. Lots of smart and helpful stuff in diverse categories – here are a few that I thought were useful (thus exposing the weaknesses in my skill sets)

13 Alerting Sites (as in “watchdog,” or “infobot” – not as in “scary,” or “alarming”
25 Start Pages to Get You Started
Knowledge is Power – Here’s 200 sites that give you power.
50 Content Management Systems
100 Twitter Tools
36 TV Media Websites to watch anything you want
32 Time Tracking Tools for Freelancers and businesses.

OpenJason is also the proprietor of Daynger Interactive, a soup-to-nuts kind of web presence creation outfit which is either the most persuasive website I’ve seen in months or is using IP mind-control to make me write this.

(If there’s an OpenJason, shouldn’t there also be OpenArgonauts?)

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