A photo I took in Mobile, Alabama
I found a great little tool called TiltShift Maker, which fixes your photos so they look like miniatures. Here is a better explanation:
It’s not a secret that Fresh News is the most popular theme on WooThemes, and that it has been customized far beyond what I ever intended the theme to be when i first designed it. One of the best customizations of this theme came from GoMediaZine, who are experts in graphic design.
It’s not often you get recognized for what you do on the internet, so when you finally do, you’re allowed to brag about it right? Of course you are!
PolaroidPress is a little personal blog theme with an artistic background and a nice little polaroid that can hold your personal images. The polaroid uses an image randomizer so you can add as many images as you want. The zip file includes a readme.txt with instructions on how to add images to the polaroid.
My desk
I’ve been working almost 5 months as a freelancer, and although it gives me much greater freedom than I had when I was in my day job, I still have to put in a normal 8-hour (or so) work day. What I find hard is actually separating between work and private life, although I’m not sure if it is actually a problem, but it is still not easy to distinguish between “working” and “surfing for leisure”. It gets dark and cold in the winter in Norway, and personally I’d rather sit in front of my PC and do something productive than watch TV.
It’s been quite the year for me in 2008, and I thought a nice blog post summing up all my “achievements” for the year would be in order. This year has seen me transition from a part time, unknown web designer to a full time freelancer and co-founder of an online “startup”.
Here are some of my personal achievements for 2008 (and late 2007 to tie the knots):
Made a couple of free WordPress themes after checking out WordPress for the first time. Thought it would be a good exercise since I wasn’t exactly pulling web design work. Saw that the free themes became very popular and were downloaded a lot. Decided to try and make a “premium” theme (or commercial/paid), after seeing that there was a market for this.
Sent an e-mail to Adii, who had a very popular commercial theme called “Premium News Theme”, about a possible collaboration on a theme. This would turn out to be quite a important e-mail that would change my path in life. NewsPress was released as the second theme in the PNT series.
It’s been a few weeks since I first sat down to doodle up something in Photoshop and walked away with a brand new theme concept. During that time I’ve been on holiday in Florida playing some golf and visiting my sister. I was supposed to be travelling to South Africa last friday, but on the last day of my stay in the US, I woke up feeling dizzy and almost fell over on my way to the bathroom. Turns out that it was case of vertigo, which led to cancelling my trip to SA, where I would have been caddying on the European Tour and visiting Adii in Cape Town. My balance is almost back to normal, and I don’t look like Ozzy Osbourne when I walk anymore.
Anyways, the cancellation gave me some extra time to finish up Busy Bee, and it is now available over at WooThemes. According to the feedback I’ve gotten on my blog and on the official release post, it looks like the design is to most people’s liking, which I’m really thankful for. I tried to replicate all the things that has made Fresh News the most popular theme on WooThemes by far, so that is why I didn’t try to do anything experimental with this, but rather improve on both the design and the features available in the theme.
Check out the demo and grab a copy if you like it!
On friday evening, I had a little time to myself, so instead of doing the normal stuff (tv, movies or misbehaving in town), I decided to start up Photoshop. I know that sounds incredibly geeky, and I won’t deny that it is… but I enjoyed the heck out of it 
A couple of beers later and I had a new theme designed for WooThemes, and we’re planning on releasing it sometime in December. Let me know what you think!
I found a great tool for web designers to use with clients or just for themselves when you want to display a photoshop draft (or any image) as it would look in your browser.
The old way of doing this would be to upload a full size image and then give your client the link. This is fine and dandy, but some clients use IE7 that uses the zoom feature on images that are larger than their browser window. You also have to live with the borders around the image.
This is where Codedpreview steps in and does the job for you. It’s quite simple to upload your image and then add your background color or even a repeating background image. I just added a top navigation to my own blog today, but I wanted to see how it would look in a browser first.
Isn’t this a much better way of presenting your drafts to your clients?
I’ve been working as a freelance web designer full time for just about four months now, but before I left my previous programming day job, I did a bit on freelancing on the side to see if I was cut out for this type of work. I made a few WordPress themes both free and ones I sold, and I soon started to get requests for custom jobbies. So what have I learned in this time of being a freelancing newbie?
At the start I took everything I could get my hands on, and I had incredibly low prices, because at that time I was just so thrilled at getting work that I didn’t think of it as salary. I made one website for $300 and used between 30-40 hours getting that site done.
The design didn’t take long, it was the fact that I hadn’t estimated the project before I started. The project specification was pretty vague, and I only calculated how long it would take me to design and code it. Even then it was quoted too low, but they had a budget, and I didn’t want to lose any work. It was the aftermath of tweaks and layout changes that came after I had finished my part that blew the project out of proportion. Today I think of this project as a great learning experience.
Hello! I’m Magnus Jepson, co-founder of WooThemes. See my business/work underneath or check my latest tweets on the right.
If you’d like to tell me about some exciting stuff or just say hello, my e-mail is magnus@jepson.no
