Big Ideas

The mail man delivered my copy of Design Meltdown's 'The Web Designer's Idea Book' just the other day. I ordered a copy to check out all of the amazing site designs as well as to see the spots where elixir sites were listed.



I originally thought our sites would be merely shown as thumbnails like most in the site and didn't expect much more. Boy was I surprised. Not only did elixir and CSStux make it into the book, but both were touted in the introductions to their respective chapters. The elixir site leads off the Icons section on pages 172-173 and CSStux begins the chapter relating to Shine on pages 205-206.

I was really honored by Patrick's kind words.

One of the funny, but great things, I thought was that on the same pages that list and tout elixir the e-junkie site is listed. Patrick compares elixir's use of icons to that of e-junkie's. What's great is I designed them both.

'The Web Designer's Idea Book' is a great book and a must have for designers looking for a lot of inspiration.

All that's fit to print

Next time you're sipping your latte and browsing your local bookstore be sure to look us up. We're currently being featured in Peppin Press' 'Web Design Index by Content 03.' (Take a look below). We're also due to be featured (both elixir and CSStux) in the upcoming Design Meltdown book 'The Web Designer's Idea Book.'

New theme: Gallery

A work of art!

This new theme has been in the works for quite some time. We put a lot of love into this one, and I hope that it shows.

Gallery is a stylish, classy theme with a professional touch. A perfect theme for a small business, portfolio, blog, application site and much more.

This theme provides a very large number of theme variations and options for customization.

The basics

Here's a quick rundown of our Gallery theme's variations. More details are covered on product page.

• Header type
• Content width
• Sidebar location
• Sidebar border
• Sidebar shine
• Sidebar backgrounds
• Site search toggle
• Site title shadow
• Site title size
• Site slogan size
• Menu font size
• Blog post spacing
• Footer divider

Color Variations
Our Gallery theme makes use of RapidWeaver's Color Picker, allowing you to very easily change the appearance of your site with a couple clicks of the mouse. You can edit these parts of the theme with the color picker:

• Body background
• Site title
• Site slogan
• Links
• Body font
• Sidebar font
• Sidebar title
• Blog title
• File sharing background
• Sidebar border
• Menu bar - Unselected
• Menu bar - Selected
• Menu bar - Hover

Headers

Our Gallery theme has a huge selection of page headers. Thirty to be exact.

They range from stylish wood backgrounds to metal, patterned fabrics, gradients and many more.

More information

There is a lot more to learn about our new Gallery theme. Hop on over to the product page and read all about the theme, as well as check out the live preview site and the walk-thru video.

Freebies

RapidWeaver allows you to display EXIF information for each of your photographs. Inspired by MultiTheme's PageMix theme we have created our own set of icons to dress up the EXIF information in the Gallery theme. We thought it might be nice to offer these icons up to everyone as a free download. You can get them at our sister site Icon Lab. Feel free to use them on your web site, in your application, blog, RapidWeaver theme, or for whatever other use you can think up!

Some random, useful stuff

I've run across some useful, new sites lately that have been a big help in web design and development. I thought it might be helpful to everyone if I listed some of these new finds for everyone. I've also thrown in some old favorites as well. Hopefully you'll find them useful.

Feel free to let everyone know about your favorites (whether they're on the list or not) in the comments below.

BgPatterns
A great site for creating semi-custom, tiled background patterns. It allows a lot of freedom in creating your background pattern and is simple and straightforward to use.

Some other great background pattern sites include: Stripe Generator, bgMaker, Pattern 4 U



Colour Lovers
This site hosts a huge selection of color swatches and groupings. It also provides a look at color trends on the web. The site's forums section is packed with color gurus.

Some other great color related sites: kuler, Color Schemer

With a heavy heart

I will be away for a few days coming up and wanted to give everyone a heads up in case I am not as quick as usual in responding to e-mails and such.

Liz and I will be traveling to Pennsylvania Wednesday to attend her grandmother's funeral. She passed away this past Saturday, August 23. I wish that I'd had the opportunity to meet and get to know her as I've heard wonderful stories about her. Liz and I had talked about visiting her on a few different occasions, but we never got the opportunity to do so, which makes me sad. It also saddens me immensely to see Liz and her family so filled with sadness over their loss.

With my father having only passed away last December (also on the 23rd) I'd hoped that there would not be such pain and sorrow in either of our families for some time to come.

We will return from our trip on Friday, so by the weekend or early next week I should be able to catch up on e-mail correspondence. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Stuff in the works

It has been a little while since my last post and just wanted to give everyone an update on what is going on behind the scenes.

Aside from our custom projects for clients I have two new themes in the works. The next theme that we release will contain a good deal of features and customization options. It will also have some styling of the EXIF data for the photo pages. In the past this has been overlooked and not styled much.

With the recent release of MultiTheme's latest project, PageMix, they truly showed that this is an areas we as developers should pay attention to. I was inspired after seeing MultiTheme's latest theme to develop some icons for the EXIF data in our future RapidWeaver themes. When we release our next theme we will also be releasing this series of 30 icons through our sister site Icon Lab. These icons will be free and can also be used by other developers to help in dressing up their own themes as well.

Speaking of our sister site, Icon Lab -- We recently released a set of free, 3D icons that you may be interested in for use on your RapidWeaver designed sites. We also have a huge collection of other free and pay stock icons available through Icon Lab that will help in dressing up your site. So stop by and have a look.

New theme: Cosmic

Out of this world

I've been working on this new theme for some time now, and am happy to finally show it off...

Cosmic is a stylish, unique theme with universal appeal. A perfect theme for a small business, portfolio, blog, application site and more.

This theme provides a huge number of theme variations and options for customization, including the ability to modify headers with the third-party application RWmultitool.

Let's not beat around the bush any longer, let's get acquainted with our new theme, Cosmic —

The basics

Here's a quick rundown of our Cosmic theme's variations. More details are covered on Cosmic's product page:

• Header style
• Sparkles Style
• Sparkles' Position
• Sidebar Location
• Content Background
• Content Width
• Menu Style
• Menu Text Alignment
• Title & Slogan Alignment
• Title Font Style
• Slogan Font Style
• Body Font Style
• Blog Title Font Style
• Menu Font Style
• Site Search Visibility
• File Sharing Background
• Blockquote Background

Color Variations
The Cosmic theme makes use of RapidWeaver's Color Picker, allowing you to easily change the appearance of your site with a couple clicks of the mouse. We also provide built-in color schemes. You can edit these parts of the theme with the color picker:

• Title
• Slogan
• Links
• Sidebar Title
• Body Type
• Sidebar Type

Headers

Cosmic has a lot of different page header styles. Eighteen to be exact.

We've also set the page headers up to be easily accessed and edited via RWmultitool so that you can customize them. In addition to making it easy to edit the page headers in RWmultitool, we've also included five blank headers that you can also modify with RWmultitool.

For instructions on using RWmultitool, please see their site at www.rwmultitool.com.

A trial version of RWmultitool is included with our theme thanks to Michaelangelo from MultiThemes.

More information

There is a lot more to learn about our new Cosmic theme. Hop on over to the product page and read all about the theme, as well as check out the live preview site and the walk-thru video.

Short vacation

Liz and I will be heading out for a short vacation tonight. We'll be back on July 7.

If you need to reach me during this time, drop me a message via the contact form. I will try to check my e-mail via the iPhone a few times while we're gone and will try to answer the most pressing e-mails that way.

Collage 2 release

YourHead Software has finalized their beta testing for their new Collage 2 page plug-in.

I could ramble on and on about this plug-in, but you'd really rather that not happen. Trust me. Instead check out Isaiah's latest blog post about the release and all of the new features.

The one thing I will highlight here from his blog post is this though:

New Styles: We’ve added a new Styles window. If you’ve used Kwix or Carousel, you’ll be familiar with it. Even better, we’ve begged, bartered, and bribed Elixir Graphics into creating a few professional grade Collage Styles that are built right in. They even did our super cool icon too!

We have also produced a couple of professional style packs that you can find here. We hope to make some more in the future as well.

Cloud Update

With help from Isaiah at YourHead Software we've updated the Cloud theme to work with YourHead's latest page plug-in — Collage 2.

This update for the Cloud theme fixes a major bug in which javascript conflicts prevented the theme from displaying graphics correctly in conjunction with Collage 2.

This update is recommended for all Cloud users.

You can download the new version of the theme here.

If you're upgrading from a previous version of a theme you will need to delete your old version before installing the new one. To do so, right-click (or crtl-click) on the theme in the theme drawer and select delete. After deleting the previous version follow the above steps to install the new version. 

* Be warned, deleting your theme will get rid of any data stored in it, such as custom headers, modified code, customized graphics, etc. Be sure to back up the data before deleting your old theme, if necessary. 

For advanced users who wish to copy only the updated files from the new theme to their modified theme here is a list of those files that have changed:

• index.html
• theme.plist

Be sure to check out Collage 2. It is a killer plug-in and a true must have for all RapidWeaver users.