Bamboo Pixel |

Jan 2, 2010

Posted

Surfing Websites from a design perspective

My first love in life – well after my family – is surfing. I would happily give up everything else (well maybe not coffee) in order to surf all day and everyday in perfect surf. That unfortunately is a bit of a pipedream and while I live only an hour or two from a few world class surf breaks my daily surf experience often consists of just checking the surf on a handful of surf report and surf cam sites.

Some of the sites do the whole surf cam, surf blog and surf forecast thing really well but from a design point of view all of the sites I found in my search could do with a little 2010 cheer. My top two favourites would have to be coastalwatch and swellnet but I still find the layouts and design elements a little too complex for my liking. Here are a selection of surf websites around the world that deal with the dark art of surf forecasting and swell prediction.

Jan 1, 2010

Posted

Second Joomla admin template

While Im in the mood for previewing up and coming releases at Joomla Bamboo I’ll give you a sneak peak at the bonus Joomla Bamboo template release that’s scheduled for release sometime in mid January. Following the success of the Simpla Admin template Ive put together a less flamboyant and simpler version of the admin theme. Functionally its not a huge departure from Simpla in terms of features eg left accordion with toggle, version notifier etc but I think the design really beds down a more mature admin interface for Joomla.

Im also in a secret discussion with Steve from Alledia to see if we can put together a free admin theme that will help to address some of the common complaints that are often placed against the Joomla admin UI. Im confident that we can help produce something that is a hackless simplification of the Joomla admin area that will hopefully improve its usability for new users … but more on that later.

Jan 1, 2010

Posted

Sneakpeak at the Joomla Bamboo January 2010 templa...

A few days before the new year I posted a preview of the Joomla Bamboo theme that is due out early in the first week in January – a few days from now. We havent released a dedicated business or corporate theme to date and I brought another designer in for this one as well. So it will be interesting to see what the response is like. Im looking forward to mixing up the designs that we release this year as well as bringing in some outside designers as well to help expand our reportoire and perhaps even free some of my time up.

Jan 1, 2010

Posted

New theme for Bamboo Pixel

Ive been a huge fan of the designs that are coming out of Elegant Themes and I thought I would use the New year as an excuse to swap the Grid design that used to adorn bamboopixel.com with this amazing theme from Elegant Themes. Even though I code and design for Joomla CMS, I love the simplicity and power of using wordpress and so until I develop my chops at wordpress theming Ill be using Glow as the base theme for the site.

Im also using the new theme as a chance to recreate the Bamboo Pixel site – its been reasonably dormant over the last few months – but I plan to put alot more love into it. Ill be posting design inspiration, design stuff and jquery and html coding snippets here and generally using the blog for non-joomla related posting. I thinks its pretty helpful to shift up the way that I write on the web and changing platforms and shifting the focus for the writing is a good way to help nurture some creativity.

Jan 1, 2010

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Joomla Bamboo Reboot

We relaunched the Joomla Bamboo site a few weeks ago and the response has been pretty amazing. Its technically a soft launch with quite a few new features that we are going to roll out over the next few weeks but for the time being we are focussing on releasing the next new theme we are calling Avante. You can see a sneak peak of the Avante theme on the Joomla Bamboo blog.

Dec 1, 2009

Posted