I hesitate to say that there is a dought in regards to talented designers and competent developers — actually, I don’t hesitate to say that. Ottawa is in serious need of talent. The schools here have churned out some really talented designers; however the smart ones fly the coup, the rest stick around long enough to ge the cushy government job and, well the cruft – they just plain suck. Mean? Yes, maybe a little. Maybe a lot. I think that’s just my frustration talking.

Case and point — I had a quick (and I do mean quick) chat with a prospective developer whose focus was on standards-compliant development. Wow, finally someone who knew something about something. Turns out this indivudual (you know who you are), prefers to puruse sites and take the CSS, altering the files and claiming them to be developed from the ground up. And they’ve been doing this for the last couple of years. Uh… right.

In any case, I’m posting about this primarily because I would like your help. If you know anyone who is looking for a job and meets the following criteria, please forward on this post or email me your information/portfolio/resume. I would love to hear from you – someone (competent preferably).

Intermediate Web Developer:
At least 2 years industry experience, developing standards-compliant sites/portals;
Strong CSS/XHMLT/JavaScript knowledge;
Understands how to develop for a LAMP server-setup;

Intermediate Web Designer:
At least 2 years industry/studio experience, designing standards-compliant sites/portals;
Understanding of CSS/XHTML/JavaScript/ActionScript helpful, but not essential;
Experience with animating and creating interactive experiences in Flash;

I would love to consider students; I’ve seen some amazing portfolios in the past, and despite the majority who lack the aformentioned credentials, I’m always willing to work with someone who has the talent and self-motivation to learn much of that on the job.

In any case, I would very much love to see some examples of some great use of JQuery if anyone out there has any. I’ve trolled through countless blogs and WP themes, but they all started looking the same to me. Oh, and if you’ve successfully integrated my Lemon Lime theme into your site, or modded it — let me know! I am eager to see what the community has done with it.

The transition from Fuel Industries to McMillan wasn’t without its bumps, and though I won’t get into that I will say that the fringe benefits of working at McMillan are awesome. I’m not talking about the salary (which is hella awsome) or all the other perks, I’m talking about the location. The McMillan building is right at the edge of the Byward Market — for those of you who are familiar with Ottawa, simply “the Market” — and the sheer number of great restaurants to hit up for lunch is something I am looking forward to experiencing. Ottawa in the summer is great, the Market is always buzzing and there’s a ton of things to see and do. Plenty of stuff to occupy my lunch hour. When I get a chance I’ll post up some photos of the office and later this summer, perhaps some pics of the Market.

FYI: this is where I am.

Lemon Lime v1.0 for WordPress is what I’m calling my current theme, don’t ask me why, I have no idea where the name came from, and I admit it’s a bit goofy, but it stuck.

Some of you have requested a tutorial on how I accomplished some of the features on this theme. The truth is, it’s not as hard as it seems, with a little tweaking here and there and some modifications to the WP Core files. I had a lot of help in terms of figuring out how WP works and so some of what you might see in the source might be a little messy. I never thought I’d ever release this at all so I’ve kept things in their “original” state. I’ll dive into modifications in later postings , in fact I’m in the process of creating a separate page for this theme and perhaps later themes as well.

Theme Caveats:

Before you install this theme there are a few caveats that you should be aware of.

The first and most important thing you should understand is that some of the more subtle styles such as the bookmarks and categories listings were possible only because I hacked up the WP Core Files. You’ll see that when you download the theme. For example, the Categories listing: by default WordPress Generates markup for the categories that excludes the counter from the category label, and any sort of block-level formatting for the link tag will force the counter text below the block-level item. I hacked the WP Core files to include the counter in the markup to allow it be rendered as you see it. The same applies for most of the typical functions you might use for rendering out other page elements. Bottom line: if you will have to over-write some files in the wp-includes directory (backup your originals first). Beware , as this tends to make your other themes not render properly in some cases.

The second thing is that I’m using PNG’s in order to make some of the visual aspects of the design work. PNG’s aren’t supported on some browsers – or at least not rendered properly. You may want to work with this a little if you prefer not to use PNG’s.

Lastly: as much as I would love to say that my markup is 100% XHTML compliant – it isn’t. There are a number of warnings that will crop up when you try to validate it (thus I left the validation link off). It renders as it should, from that perspective I am quite happy, but one day I will get around to making it 100% compliant.

If there are any missing files, please let me know.

Photoshop Source Files:

I’ve included the main Photoshop source file which contains groupings that show the different screens I created for this theme. I’ve made some minor modifications and I can’t remember if the guides are 100% accurate for slicing – if they aren’t you can always refer to the image folder for reference.

Considerations:

The only thing I ask is that my credit remain with the CSS files and a brief mention in the disclaimer box with a link back to my site (see the bottom of this page). If you make modifications to the theme I would really love to see it, as I’m sure I can learn a lot from those more experienced.

Thank you everyone for your interest, I’ll be working on a new theme soon and once I get tired of that I may release it if it this one proves to be popular enough.

I don’t know if it’s me or simply a continued lack of true enthusiasm for the concept, but I ended up shelving it once again and narrowed my focus back to something more personal. farfromfearless.com was intended to be a flash-based portfolio site but I didn’t find that concept very interesting at all and the amount of commitment it would take to maintain it outstripped my current budget for time. Around the same time I was looking at what was happening on the web with standards compliant site design. A lot of it really blew my mind because I come from a print design background where certain layout rules and concepts just couldn’t be applied to web-design without costing the user in terms of patience and bandwidth; and honestly I’m a bit sick to death of all the flash sites out there. Debatably one of the most popular forms of standards-compliant design is blogs; it mixed everything from writing and design into a creative, tangible form with the ability to update the look-and-feel on a whim. How wicked is that?

With that in mind farfromfearless.com was born.

So here it is: my first blog. I thought it would be nice to give mention to some of the sites that inspired me in this direction. All of them, in one form or another, provided small bits of inspiration that contributed to the concept for farfromfearless.com.

http://www.whatdoiknow.org
Todd Dominey’s blog always makes me feel like I’m reading a daily. My first job in the design industry was as a layout designer for the Vancouver Sun. Dominey’s site has a lot of the same elements and typographic approaches that I typically like. It doesn’t hurt to have content that’s fun to read.

http://www.simplebits.com
Web-designer Dan Cedarholm, has gone through a couple iterations of his site since I’ve been a regular reader. This latest one is a much simpler and straightforward approach to content and layout. What I really love about this design is the details. Little things like the bullets for lists, and icons for various links and what not are all lend to the overall pleasant experience when visiting his site.

http://bartelme.at
Jon Snook introduced me to this site. Wolfgang Bartelme has always been generous with color. It is probably the most striking thing about his site when you visit it and I regularly go back there just to get a dose. Like simple bits, Wolfgang has gone through a few design iterations over the last year – this latest one is perhaps his most ambitious seeing as he switched over from a custom-made CMS to ExpressionEngine. His archives are a great source of inspiration for ideas and an excellent resource for tutorials. I love seeing how other designers approach the same challenge.

http://veerle.duoh.com
Veerle’s site is stunning. I came across it during my search for a blogging engine that I could feel comfortable developing with; in the case of Veerle’s blog, it was after coming across ExpressionEngine. Regardless of the software powering her site, she has an amazing sense of layout and color. If you get a chance look through her archives for previous versions of her current design.

http://www.alistapart.com
Taken from their “About” section: “A List Apart Magazine (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.” This site has been an indispensable resource for techniques and insights into standards-compliant design and development written by a host of contributing authors. Take the time to read through their articles; there’s a lot in there that might save you a lot of time and hassle with your next design.

These sites are only a small cross section of what has inspired me. There’s a ton more that I could mention here but I’ll save those for later.

I should also mention a couple people who really helped me out in the implementation process. Aaron Pepper is perhaps one of the wickedest CSS/PHP developers I’ve ever worked with – the guy is a prodigy with CSS; and Jon Snook of snook.ca, another awesome developer I used to work with and one who not only showed me the benefits of maintaining a blog as a creative outlet but is also a continual source of inspiration. His sometimes unorthodox approaches to UI design and implementation always come across as common sense. Jon was kind enough to hook me up with some web space to host farfromfearless.com. Far from being complete, this site still has its share of growing pains and small issues to work out in terms of true compliancy with my markup; I’ll get to those eventually.