Design Shard

Hash One – A premium wordpress theme giveaway by Obox Comment to Win

Im glad that Design Shard has got its hands on one of the great theme releases by the guys at from-the-couch who are also the same people at obox design , its pack with cool admin extras and a vibrant design. read below to see what its all about and how to win a copy.

WHAT MAKES THIS THEME SPECIAL

‘Hash One’ is the first theme to come out of the Obox Signature Series. This theme is aimed at those who want their personal blog to stand out well above the rest with a unique design which has a subtle, stylish impact on your visitors.

Sticking with the Obox Design style we have implemented all the elements which we have mentioned in our blog and video show. This includes the ‘Gina Effect’, The Ten Pixel Method, and correct margins & padding.

Along with an awesome design for your WordPress blog, Hash One also includes video features. The home page will incorporate your five latest videos which uses slick jQuery effects to switch between each show.

COMPETITON DETAILS:

By entering this competition you will stand a chance to win 1 copy of the Hash One wordpress theme which is only limited to only 40 copies ( 35 given away on from-the-couch and 5 copies to be given away on selected blogs inc design shard ). Simply follow the steps below in order to participate:

Leave a comment, ( express what you like about the theme , any thing you want )
Remember to put a valid email address in the comment field so you can be contacted if you win
Feel free to tweet and retweet about this great theme.

And there you have it, you have officially entered the competition! Good Luck! Winners will be selected through a random draw!!

Please note closing date of this competition is Friday, April the 3rd 2009

SCREENSHOTS

If you want to see more of this theme then go over to from-the-couch blog and check out the screen shots.

DISCLAIMER

While this theme is free, we will not support any issues which arise due to code/design/css customization. The intention of this series is that it is a limited edition, premium WordPress theme which is exclusive to the winners of this competition, please do not replicate or redistribute this themes design. This theme does not support Internet Explorer 6 and does not come with the original PSD files.

12 Cool Big Cartel T-shirt Stores

Big Cartel offers an excellent resource for indie t-shirt lines looking for a quick and easy social online store. However, as of this posting, there were well over 4,000 shops at Big Cartel. The majority of these serve up some t-shirts and we wanted to share 12 of our faves? Read on to see what we like about each of these stores.

Daft Packs

The #1 Pick in Premium Sportswear. Legends Only

BYH New York

Founded in March 2013 in New York City. by H. aims to create interesting and affordable everyday wear. We seek to make functional, season-less as well as unisex clothing by following a minimalist approach.

JVP Melbourne

New Fashion Design from Melbourne

Well Fed New York

Started in New York City in 2010, Well Fed has grown from a simple visual blog to a worldwide apparel company.

Ovidius

Coming from the streets of London, Ovidius Clothing is a Highstreet brand inspired by surrounding Contemporary Culture. Having launched in 2013, Our aim is perfecting our products for our customers. We have an eye for detail on our quality garments sold at affordable prices.

DRARE

Clothing from the Midlands, UK

12Stack

There is a lot of action going on here. Sometimes that is a bit much, but showed that excess can look good too.

Dirty Rich

Simple, clean, minimal. Enough said.

M+RC Noir

How do you get it do Fresh? By washing your tees with too much detergent inside your animated washing machine.

Summit

Big imagery and even bigger clothing

KYC Vintage

This is a very cool touch for a t-shirt line that covers quite a few subjects.

Drop The Anchor

Original Melbourne Streetwear, Shop

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Getting giddy with GoMedias hand drawn wings

Please excuse the title, Wings can be one of the hardest things to draw other than the human figure, well Go Media have been very busy and only yesterday released one part of set 14, these had to be hand drawn wing vectors as usual they also have a free sample

The Wing Vectors

You can take one look at this set and say “Awesome” because Go media have really out done themselves with this one, I can only imagine how many hours it has taken to perfect each and every feather ( there’s also some bat wings in there I notice! ). The pack costs only $10 / £6 and for the time it will save you and the quality that they are compared to many other vector products. These really are for professional looks, its crazy

I was looking at their other vector wing sets and these simply blow them away in the detail and craftsman ship, I’m guessing these will be mainly used by the avid tee-shirt and apparel designer, and rightly so because they will definitely take a design to a new level.

Go Media

In my eyes Go media is one of the friendliest companies on the web that I know of (or at least in the design sector), they serve up free vectors from time to time to give you a taste of what they’ve been working hard on, They more often than not reply to your comments on their blog Go mediazine, they even tweet, these are all the signs of a great company doing everything right. Getting a response from a company can go along way especially when your treated like an individual. With blogs and social media platforms available to day this means companies can be one on one with its customers and like minded people.

They share their passion for design with tutorials, that are well received by the design community, they also blog about their experiences within business, now this can be very insightful for some one starting out in their own ventures and many will be able to relate to and learn from that, making Go media a great asset.

What I did with my Go media wings

I got my set of wings and was immediately excited to see 14 different types of wings, Angel, bat, eagle etc one for every occasion. I’m not an apparel designer so my brain got thinking because I knew I wanted to do a post about them but also wanted to create something with them as well (it had been snowing all day so there wasn’t much else to do!) so I came up with this…

Guardian of Design Shard

Using one of the angel type wings from Go media I also grabbed a picture of a knight, an ancient door and a little bit of creativity.

What do you think about it, it was quite rushed and completed in about 2 hours, the light source might be a little off but I think it turned out quite well,

The styling of the wings was already really slick so I wanted to carry this type of vector styling through the image so I made some swirls with the same thick border to act as appendages coming from the wings and wrapping around the knight, as if it is alive!

Source Files

The ancient door was found on Flickr by using the Creative Commons search and the knight was found on sxc free stock site, the wings are from Go medias hand drawn collection

Your Thoughts

So what do you think of Go Media? Have you used any of their vectors in you designs? If you have feel free to post links and share your comments below… what do you think of my creation, be nice!

Review: Design Shard Now hosted with WpWebHost

Are you thinking about changing your hosting company, I have, the value and support is mind blowing. I’ve recently changed my hosting from Godaddy to WP WebHost, and its going great. You can find out more below in this review.

About Wp WebHost

WP WebHost is a hosting company that is dedicated to WordPress powered sites, they are a team of web masters that are enthusiastic about WordPress, Wp WebHost began when they were annoyed about other hosting companies not taking WordPress in to consideration on there servers and there fore not having the correct settings to run there blogs properly, so they created there own hosting service specifically for this cause, Wp WebHost, If you want to know more you can visit there about page that has plenty of information.

Pricing & Cost

They have one hosting plan that you can choose but they can also tailor a hosting plan specially for you needs, i think this makes it allot simpler to get started.

Freedom Plan

So the freedom plan which is what Design Shard is hosted on is great you get large amounts of bandwidth per month and can host up to 50 web sites on the same host. Ill outline the pricing and what you get below

50GBs of web space
500GBs of monthly bandwidth
Host up to 50 domain names
WordPress-compatible server
WordPress-savvy support team
$5/month / $80/Year / $120/2 years

Im always creating sites so I jumped at the chance to host with Wp WebHost because of the amount of websites you can have on the same host , I was hosting with Godaddy and I could only have sub domains, with this you can have up to 50 actual domains so that’s 50 website depending on your 50Gbs of storage and 500Gbs of bandwidth per month. There support team is great and would almost defiantly recommend you a hosting plan to suit your needs

I know Godaddy offers an ultimate hosting plan with multiple domains but the pricing is what put me off, if you can calculate how much bandwidth you will use per month you can clearly see how this hosting plan would benefit you.

Money Back Guarantee

Ive noticed on there site they have a guarantee of 100 days that if your not happy you get your money back you cant be fairer than that, they aren’t the sort of company to take you for a ride or at least I haven’t got that impression, I cant see why you would be unsatisfied.

Customer Support

when ever i had to contact support via email their response was within the day sometimes with in the hour which was great to fit round a busy schedule. Their team is well experienced with WordPress and can help you with your WordPress related problems with ease. I can only say good things about there support which you may not get with bigger hosting companies.

WpWebHost Features

So apart from the features I out lined above in pricing & cost you get more, ill outline some that stand out for me and I find excellent. But you can see the full list over on there specification page

99.5% Uptime
Unlimited Subdomains
Compatible for PHP, MySQL Database, and Perl scripts.
Unlimited MySQL Database
POP3, IMAP & Web-based E-mail Access
Perfect Hosting Envinronment for WordPress 2.0 – 2.7

As you can see you can create as many databases as you want as well as sub domains, its perfect for hosting WordPress but you can host you PHP and database driven web sites as well.

A few Extra Details

You maybe interested to know a few things that I noted when using this hosting service.

Control Panel

The control panel is cPanel, you may have experience with this already or not, I had not used it but had known about it, its really simple to navigate and isn’t complex.

They have Fantastico installed in the control panel which makes installing WordPress really easy.

Mail Accounts

You can create unlimited mail accounts, I managed to import all my mail from my Godaddy online account to my new one on Wp WebHost as well as downloading them to my computer with outlook.

Domain Names

All my domain names are on Godaddy so I can cancel my hosting and keep my domains, you could also transfer them to Wp WebHost but I chose not to make life easier, you have to change the name servers in Godaddy to the Wp Webhost servers and you’ll be set to go, they provide all the information in a welcome email.

Test URL

So before you change your nameservers you can set up your site on a test URL that they provide, this ensures that everything works just fine and all you files are uploaded properly before you swap over. There is basically no downtime when swapping servers as long as your current hosting is active as well.

Guides To Moving WordPress

I did a bit of Googling to see what I could find to help me change hosts without bothering support and I found an extremely useful article that I followed to move WordPress to my new server.

I followed this guide and every thing was fine: how to transfer your wordpress blog from one host to another host

Conclusion

Design Shard is now Hosted with WP Web Host and its been a really great experience so far, support is fast at responding to questions about their hosting and about WordPress, the features of there servers are better than what I was on at Godaddy! I would recommend them with confidence if your thinking of changing hosts.

They really do care, if you know of Naldzgraphics design blog, he was having alot of problems with his hosting and they were trying there best to help him out.

Comments

Do you have any recommended hosting providers, what works well for you? are you hosted with Wp WebHost? How is it going? Thinking about changing hosts? Got any questions? Please leave a comment.

Amazing Ornamental Design Inspiration – Baroque Style

This is a collection of baroque style (ornamental) design, this style originates from baroque styles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the word baroque can also simply mean that something is elaborate with many details. [Further Reading]

This style can be incorporated in to Logos, T-Shirts, Posters, Type … Anything

You may also want to check out this recent post on Floral typography

Shiny Binary

I had to add shiny binaries “Perfect porftolio” piece for Digital Arts Magazine and “Mystic” that was inspired by Eastern style statues and carvings, you can clearly see the statue within the image and the ornate flourishes.

Shaeriff

This pencilled etching is great way to see how the shadows and the darker crevices give the ornamental style its three dimensions

Opera78

An Amsterdam based illustrator that goes by the studio mane of opera78 has a great drawing style so checking out some of his personal and commercial work is a good idea.

One Twenty Six

Based in New York One Twenty Six produces some great packaging and branding, you can also see some of the ornate designs in there logo designs.

Shepard Fairy

This guy has a real eye for poster design and you can check out his fine art collection for some more inspiring examples of his work. i also found this image via abduzeedos a mixed inspiration post to look through.

J R Velasco

a great example of these ornate finishes is on this website header, wrapping around other illustrations and hand drawn elements. The old vintage look gives it even more character and era.

Irish Wind

Great baroque style technical pen drawing in the making just goes to show how much time and effort goes in to such a piece like this.

Igraver

This website has a great visual tutorial on how to recreate this style from start to finish

I Cant Hear

I Cant Hear design studio with some great work and sketches of work in progress gives a good understanding of work flow to final piece, as seen below a sketch and final piece in vector form is mind blowing.

Guarniero

Has some great collections of old scans on his flickr

Eduardo Cife

Eduardo Cife of Misprinted Type has some awesome illustration work from book covers to posters. a true vintage style that you can see throughout his work.

Ansel Olson

Ansel has some inspiring sets on flickr from photos to scans like the one shown below, decorated type is another great way to incorporate this style.

Anouther Great decorated alphabet.

Bibliodyssey

Very detailed breath taking ornate typography incorporating cherubs, birds and statues.

86era

A designer from Russia known a 86era due to being born in 1986, also found via ilovetypography inspiring type

Comments

I would put this style high up in my favourites and i find it very inspiring to look at others work and how they can incorporate it in to designs such as web sites, Typography and posters you name it and it can be done, adding extra flair and interest.

Do you get inspired by this style or know some great pieces of work to share? Please leave a comment.

WHAT MAKES THIS THEME SPECIAL

CUSTOM SITE FEATURES INCLUDE

COMPETITON DETAILS:

SCREENSHOTS

DISCLAIMER

The Wing Vectors

Go Media

What I did with my Go media wings

Guardian of Design Shard

Source Files

Your Thoughts

About Wp WebHost

Pricing & Cost

Freedom Plan

Money Back Guarantee

Customer Support

WpWebHost Features

A few Extra Details

Control Panel

Mail Accounts

Domain Names

Test URL

Guides To Moving WordPress

Conclusion

Comments

Shiny Binary

Shaeriff

Opera78

One Twenty Six

Shepard Fairy

J R Velasco

Irish Wind

Igraver

I Cant Hear

Guarniero

Eduardo Cife

Ansel Olson

Bibliodyssey

86era

Comments