One of the great things about moving into my new studio space at the end of last year, was that I got to meet a whole new group of artists, designers, photographers and other creative types.
One of those designers is Glenn Thomas. Glenn put together the header and element design for our Joomla template release Arcadia and as you can see he is a seriously talented illustrator.
I wanted to get an idea of his workflow and design process so I asked him the following questions ...
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How long have you been a designer? Where did you study? What sort of work do you do?
Morning'. I've been a full-time freelancer for about 5 years now, originally in straight photo-manipulation artworks before venturing into Illustration & Animation about 2yrs ago. I did a very broad 2 year Diploma of Multimedia at RMIT TAFE, but essentially ended up self-teaching all of the skills I use today. Que obligatory reference to my online teaching class.
I'm very happy to announce the availability of our April Joomla template release - Arcadia.
Arcadia is a fun and creative responsive Joomla template that features an awesome header design from Glenn Thomas aka The Fox and the King. Glenn has a unique visual style and after meeting him a few months ago in the new studio space I couldn't wait to put his style into a Joomla template for you. I'll be publishing an interview with Glenn in the next few days so stay tuned if you want to find out more about this amazing Melbourne artist.
Arcadia is built on the T3 framework and features a tonne of theming options and some very flexible functionality. It's built to be compatible with our new Zenkit v2 release (Demo coming soon) so all of you K2 fans out there will be able to drop Arcadia into an existing or new K2 site without any trouble at all.
We have been a little quiet on the blog since the release of our last Joomla template, Zenhost, but that's mainly because we have had our collective heads down working on hard on some exciting new things.
First cab off the rank is V2 of our Zenkit templates - standalone, responsive templates for K2.
Zenkit is all grown up now and I'm happy to say it is even more flexible, with some nice new styling, layouts and functionality.
I've just unwrapped our latest Joomla template and it's a little gem.
Zenhost is a clean and simple business template built for those of you who sell your goods, products or services online. It's a flexible theme built with bootstrap and T3 and comes with a slew of features and options to make it your own.
The old saying that you have to be in it to win it, has been slightly twisted today because "Everyone who was in it did win it" ... Well one person won it slightly more than the others, but everyone who entered the "Show us your workspace" competition from a few weeks ago will receive at least a 3 month subscription just for the effort of entering the competition.
I really enjoyed all of the entries and seeing all of your spaces. As I've mentioned previously, while web work can be physically isolating, there are ways that we can make our online experience more intimate and personal. One of those ways is to see where the people we email, skype, post forum threads to and tweet with works.
So without further to do ... drum roll please ...
The minimal Joomla template called Blanko, released as a part of the Zen Building Block collection is now available as a Joomla 3 Template.
Blanko is a the simplest of the five Joomla templates released in the package and is a clean slate for you to start creating your site from.
I'm happy to announce that the Standard Joomla template is now available in a Joomla 3 compatible version.
If you recall the initial release of Standard back in September 2012, it was released as a part of our Zen Building Blocks collection. The Zen Building blocks were released as a pack of responsive starter Joomla templates that aimed to cover a wide variety of common layout types.
T3, LESS and Joomla 3 ready ...
The updated theme has some awesome control over colours using Theme Magic. I wrote about the possibilities of using Theme Magic a little earlier today and I think that when you take a look at the Theme Magic options available in this new release of Standard, I'm pretty sure you will agree that this is an incredible customisation tool.
As per all of our T3 based themes it comes with support for LESS, is built using bootstrap and has the same responsive layout control as our other recent Joomla 3 template releases.
OS Training video interview
I had the good fortune to chat with Rod Martin from OS Training a few weeks ago as a part of their OS Talks.
It was good to meet someone I've only ever tweeted with or spoken to via skype or email. Even though the interview wasn't face to face, it was great to finally put a face to the name.
If you are interested, you can see what I look like without my hat on. I've had some feedback that I'm bald (I prefer bald-ing), scruffy (I prefer relaxed casual) and that my accent (what accent?) was hard to understand. But I'll let you be the judge of that.
Enjoy!
Theme magic is a non-destructive real time preview tool for your T3 powered website.
Theme Magic makes it possible to create a multitude of theme presets and colour schemes by using a colour wheel or specific HEX values in order to manipulate pre-determined elements within the template.
