Arcane Palette Creative Design » artisinal wordpress development

This wallpaper is what happened when I set out to do something with our holiday lights texture photos. It’s colorful and fun and you can look at it many different ways, since there’s lots going on. I’ve been catching myself staring at it on my monitor many times, dreaming of a connect four game that is as attractive and chaotic as this looks.

Hot Mess is available in widescreen, standard, and iPhone formats in the following sizes:

Widescreen
1920×1200
1440×900

Standard
1600×1200
1280×960
1024×768

iPhone
320×480

We also included a version for your Twitter account!

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The kidsblog is a site we did a long time ago and recently realized that it wasn’t in our portfolio.  kidsblog is mostly a photo and updates blog for our two kids.  As such, the only clients we had to really please were ourselves, our families, and the kids themselves.  Having previously used a pretty basic, out-of-the-box, Kubrick-based theme for the previous platform we were using, sblog.  When we decided to change the platform, we wanted to redesign the site to show off our personality a bit more, and the personality of the kids starring in the blog.

The biggest success story about the kidsblog theme is that when we finished and showed it to Gavin, our oldest, he was excited by the design and fascinated by the colors and shapes, the hands and the sun.  For us, that meant: mission accomplished!

We really tried to create a design that was fun to look at, brightly colored, but also not distracting from the content.  We designed it for large resolutions in mind, but made it compatible for 1024 x 768 resolution for relatives with older computers (and provided a helpful walkthrough for changing your resolution for visitors who may come and not know what a 1024 x 768 resolution is).

Since its’ launch, we’ve updated various things to add functionality or keep the design fresh, most recently by adding IntenseDebate for commenting, and updating the design to be more of a widescreen theme.  Even though we don’t show it off as much anymore, this is still one of our favorite WordPress themes, with a unique blend of grunge and flair creating a feeling of something that is really dirty but also really fun — just like our kids!

WordPress plugins used: IntenseDebate, PagerFix, Shutter Reloaded, FeedBurner

kids.jazzsequence.com

Sunflower Favors is a small business selling wedding and party favors.  They wanted a creative, boutique-y feel and had requested their site be built on ZenCart software.
We’ve had a lot of experience pushing, tweaking, and otherwise completely pulling apart and putting back together ZenCart designs to make them look anything but like a typical ZenCart site, so we were more than willing to build a beautiful design to appeal to their specific audience.  We came up with a bright-colored, clean but artistic design featuring a logo with the colors of their red sunflower throughout the letters and some flowery, swirling designs to add to the corners.

We did a bit of template tinkering to achieve the specific layouts they wanted, as well as designing their logo graphic.  We also helped get their payment gateway set up and tested on the site so they just needed to worry about entering their products into the database.