jemjabella

Favourite Layouts in July

After posting about my favourite layouts in June I figured this is something I could keep doing! And so here we are, my favourite layouts this month...

Rainbow Stuff

Ashley has added a personal touch with her cartoon representations of herself, husband (I think!), and cats.

Skylish

I love the splash navigation detail in this one. It's different, but without being all "mystery meat" like graphic site navigation of the past.

Kya's Blog Thing

Be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom with this one, hehe.

OMG Ninjas in my Layout!

So, here it is, finally all coded up and polished and pretty. My shiny new layout, which is totally awesome and 99% down to Ms Bloody Awesome Lilian. Yes, I have given her new names.

I say 99% because I tweaked the titles and made them not-italic because I have secret feelings of dread when it comes to italic. Of course, I could have been a good client and told Lilian this in advance (instead of saying "yeah, just do whatever") but I don't like to make life easy for people.

The new whizzbang layout comes with all the parts ready for me to turn on the tumbleloggyness of Habari + my uber coding (or... well, not, because I've broken it at the moment) so look out for that coming soon too. :D

Please tell Lilian how cool she is, because I've run out of ways to say it.

ETA: the ninja is in the sidebar on the front page ;)

Favourite Layouts in June

Towards the end of 2009 it seemed like I was seeing the same premade WordPress themes over and over and over again. Bloggers were too bored / busy to create something fresh and new? Who knows. It was pants, though (from a visitor perspective) and didn't do much to inspire me to make over my own blog. Not that you guys should feel responsible for my state of mind or anything, don't worry yourself there. :P

So anyway, tada! I have seen a few fab layouts this month. In an attempt to lighten things up after a few dramatastic posts I decided to do some link love! :D Here we go...

Mia Chimera

Interesting, original artwork? Check! Pretty arty flourishes? Check! Witty quotes and one-liners? Check! Big, easy to find/use navigation? Check! A daft tagline? Check! What's not to love?

CUPKATE.org

Score — more original artwork! Cute custom(?) font, original icons in the sidebar too. Plus, Kate's birthday is in January and everyone knows people born in January are superior to everyone else.

jemjabella

OMG OMG OMG! Yes, this is a sneaky self-whoring plug here at the bottom for my NEW LAYOUT that is a huge surprise and mystery *doo doo doo* not least because it's being created at this very moment by the lovely Lilian who is a genius of all things arty and creative. Coming soon to a jemjabella.co.uk near you... :D

Made this weeks ago

Got bored a few weeks ago so put this together. Have nothing deep and meaningful to say about it, which is lucky because typing one-handed takes forever. :p Mind you, I can't remember the last time I had two hands free for typing. With that said, I've not tested it in anything other than Firefox - see aforementioned one-handed excuse. Any bugs are likely to go unfixed.

Seems to be a problem with the tags, bear with me... Fixed, no thanks to PHP (stupid bug)

Thank you to Lilian for modifying these icons for my header.

6 Dollar Layout

After much nagging and one amusing — and wholly accurate — unrequested review I finally decided to get off my arse and finish changing my layout, something that has been on the cards for months.

However, failed design after failed design led to much frustration. In my weakened, feeble state I decided that spending hours of an evening in front of Photoshop was simply not an option I wished to continue playing with. Instead, I resorted to the dreaded option of downloading a template (*gag* / *vomit* / etc). I bought the BLOG THEME GREEN PSD (descriptive name, I know) and did some heavy tweaking to make it look more Jem-esque (the irony being I spent more time tweaking this than I did creating my previous layout.)

Credit for the cheesy comment icon goes to DryIcons, the ninja to IconBuffet (as usual) and of course, the base layout 'iMike'... and I'm sorry for doing this to your lovely design.

At this point the only tasks left are to style the comments (in progress), and to liven up the dreaded sub-navigation (see the sidebar on any of my main sections). The latter of which I'm all out of ideas for and therefore welcome input from all of the design geniuses that read my blog.