FRESH01

Just a quick note to let you know that I have decided to put the PSD for my Scruffy WordPress theme up for download after some folks requested it. You can get the PSD by clicking on the download PSD link on the Scruffy theme page.

I’m extremely proud to announce that the {radiiate} portfolio website is (finally) online. We launched it on Friday last week after being in development for a good few months.

Adii established {radiiate} early in 2008 and I was doing a lot of freelance work for him during the first few months of this year, which eventually lead to him employing me as full-time designer. But before we launched the site all there was was a splash page with contact details. This was not really an issue (business-wise), as Adii still gets a good amount of job requests via his blog.

But we desperately needed somewhere to show off the awesome projects we have been working on through the year, as we had no portfolio to show prospective clients. And that’s where the new site comes in.

The reason we took so long to launch the site, was that we were only working on it when we had time in-between all those client projects, or when we were waiting for client feedback.

I must say that all of us at {radiiate} are extremely proud of our latest creation. We feel it showcases a few of our best projects over the last year, and is testament to how good Adii, Foxinni and myself work together as a team. And for those of you who follow my blog can now see why FRESH01 goes long periods without updates – because I am kept very busy at my day job!

Some of you may have noticed that the downloads for my free WordPress themes went slightly wonky over the weekend. When you clicked on a download link, you ended up on a page full of strange characters.

The reason for this was that I upgraded FRESH01 to beta 2 of WordPress 2.7 on Thursday last week, and it seems like the download manager plugin I was using (WP-DownloadCounter) didn’t quite agree with the new WordPress. I updated the plugin to the latest version, but it didn’t help. I even downgraded my WordPress install back to 2.6.3, but the issue still persisted.

I decided to uninstall my download manager plugin and go with a other option, WP-Download Manager, instead, and luckily that solved my problem. Honestly, I liked my old plugin better, but there’s not much I can do about that!

So this was just a note to let you know that everything is back to normal, and you can download all my free themes as you always did. And I’ll probably wait for the final release of WordPress 2.7 before upgrading!

I’m sure you would agree that inspiration is a critical part of any designers life. Seeing what other people have accomplished gives us something to aspire to and motivates us to push ourselves and progress further as designers. So I decided that I would list the designers who’s style and success inspire me on a daily basis.

All these designers should be well known to most of you, so by no means do I feel I’m exposing you to something new (if I am, then that’s awesome!). These are simply designers who I feel have achieved great success in the web design industry and motivates me to be a better designer.

So without further ado, here are my 7 favorite web designers: Continue reading…

Collis and the gang over at Envato are really on a roll. It sometimes feels to me like they are releasing new sites on a daily basis.

They already have have a number of digital market places (Flashden, AudioJungle, ThemeForest) and a bunch of tutorial sites that cover nearly every area of creative/multimedia design (PSDTUTS, AUDIOTUTS, VECTORTUTS, NETTUTS). And don’t forget the holy grail of freelance blogs, FreelanceSwitch. Continue reading…

I’m very proud to finally launch my long overdue redesign of FRESH01. It’s just about been a year since I started this blog in October of 2007 and the old design had become a bit out-dated and boring to me. So it feels good to put a ‘fresh’ coat of paint on it.

You’ll see I went for a completely different look that I feel shows of my personal design style much more than the old design did. Hopefully the new design is a testimony of how much I have learnt and grown design wise over the past year.

I’ll post a more in-depth look at the new design in the following week, with links and credits to all the resources I used to create this new design, so stay tuned for that. I just wanted to get the new design out today after spending the weekend working on the finishing touches.

I would appreciate any feedback and criticism (constructive, ofcourse! ), so feel free to give your opinion in the comments to this post.

They certainly did! It’s been just over 10 months since I launched Fresh01 in October of last year. My original goal for this blog was to establish an online presence for myself and generate freelance income. Overall I’ve been happy with the design and it has served it’s purpose (to a certain extent ).

My situation since last year has changed quite a bit, and seeing as I no longer freelance for a living, my needs/requirements for this blog has also changed. Plus I have become bored of the current design (fellow designers will know how I feel ). So the obvious thing for me to do is redesign my blog.

I have already started on a new design and hope to have it up and running by the end of this month. I plan on changing my approach to running the site a bit. Instead of marketing myself, I’ll focus on writing quality articles on design and WordPress. I want to release more free themes, and I even have plans to enter the premium themes market.

The new design is already looking good, and I’m super excited about the relaunch. Stay tuned for more news on the launch date…

Things have been taking an interesting turn in recent weeks. As I mentioned here, I moved into offices with Adii in mid July. The original idea was for me to “rent-a-desk” from him and essentially we would each continue with our own endeavors. As I mentioned at the end of this post here, there were some other new developments that I could not mention because we were sorting out the details.

The details have since been sorted out, so I can finally let the cat out of the bag. Since the beginning of this year, a great deal of my freelancing work came from Adii. We have built up a really good working relationship during the course of the last few months. And since being together in the offices it has been even better for us to work together, as we can communicate face to face, and not through emails and Basecamp. Really speeds up the process quite a bit.

Also, Adii recently started {radiiate}, a creative web solutions company, and that’s were most of my freelance work for him came from. Eventually the work load from {radiiate} got too much for one man to handle. And seeing that myself and Adii work together so well, Adii offered me a job as Senior Designer at {radiiate}. And I gladly accepted .

Funny thing is that I started freelancing to avoid getting an office job, and look at me now. Exactly the opposite has happened. But I don’t regret my decision at all. With the new job I get to focus on what I love, which is designing and building websites, while Adii deals with clients, admin and running his business.

{radiiate} has been off to a great start and we’ve been hard at work on client projects. We also plan on launching the company website soon. Lots of hard work lay ahead, but the future looks to be a bright one .

I’ve been freelancing since October of 2007. It’s been super fun thus far, and I don’t have any regrets for taking the risk of going solo instead of getting a regular 9-5 office job. Up until now, I have been working from home. Now this obviously has it’s pros and cons, but overall I have really enjoyed it.

The only part of working from home that got to me was the isolation. And even with the internet being the social networking wonder that it is, I have always believed that “virtual”(or “online”, if you wish) communication will never be a substitute for real life social interaction. Continue reading…

This is slightly stale news by now, but I need to get my 2cents worth. WordPress have announced the opening their brand new theme directory to the public. The directory follows the same familiar format as the plugins directory, so if you are familiar with the latter you should feel comfortable with the new directory straight away.

Anybody can register and upload themes. The great thing is that the WordPress guys are putting in some extra effort to ensure that the themes in the directory are top notch and fully functional. And if the plugin directory is anything to judge by, we will soon have a directory full of awesome free WordPress themes.

After finishing and releasing my latest free theme, Scruffy, earlier today, I went ahead and submitted the theme to the new directory. Now I’m just waiting for the theme to be inspected, reviewed and (hopefully) approved. I will post an update as soon as WordPress notify me whether or not I made the cut. Wish me luck!

*UPDATE: Immediately after I clicked the “Publish” button for this post, I received an email from WordPress that my theme has been accepted in the directory. So I pretty proud to announce my first free theme in the WordPress theme directory! Check it out…