Beginning today, December 24, 2009 I’ll be out of the office for the holidays. Liz and I are going out of town Friday evening and will be gone for a while so I won’t be getting back to emails until we return January 5, 2010.

I did want to offer you all some goodies and tell you about some of what we have going on.

Kiwi
If you’ve not heard Isaiah, from YourHead Software, has recently released Kiwi, a brand-new twitter client. It is truly outstanding! I had the pleasure of working on it with him, designing graphics and UI elements and such, as well as themes for the app itself. I look forward to continuing my work with him on Kiwi as the app goes forward.

Kiwi Themes
In connection to Kiwi, Ollie Levy and myself are working on Kiwi Themes. It is a repository for themes for Isaiah’s twitter client. Currently We have 12 themes online and will have more after the new year. We’re also working on a system to allow users to upload their own themes to share with the world, and much more. So be sure to check that out at http://kiwithemes.com

Wallpaper
I’ve also put up some desktop wallpaper for Kiwi to help dress up your Mac.

Icons
While you’re on the Icon Lab check out out the Kiwi wallpaper be sure to have a look at our Unity icon set. It was released earlier this year and is great for site and application development. We’re offering a holiday discount for items at both Elixir and the Icon Lab at the bottom of this blog post.

Dashing
Speaking of recently released items — I recently put out a new RapidWeaver theme titled Dashing. It’s a great theme for designing a small business site, blog, personal site, portfolio and much more. It too is included in the holiday discount below, as well as our Ultimate Bundle which includes each and every theme we sell.

Holiday discount
You can use the discount code below during checkout to receive 25% off your entire purchase. The sale ends January 6, 2010 at noon (Eastern US time). The code for the discount is HOLIDAYFUN09. This code is good at both here at Elixir as well as at the Icon Lab.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful, and safe, holiday and we want you to know we have a lot of really exciting things planned for 2010!

Tags: Themes, Icons, Kiwi, Wallpaper

I have been working with Isaiah, from YourHead Software, on designing the user interface and icons for his latest RapidWeaver plug-in, Stacks. I’d like to tell you a little about the plug-in and show you some of the icons we developed and a little bit of the process behind developing the icons.

Slices
Each Stacks page is built from slices that are defined by you, the user. Anything from a Styled Text slice to an Image or Columns slice. You can create a complex layout quickly and with ease. Each slice needed a simple, clear icon to represent it. Isaiah had an idea of the sort of icons he was looking for to represent most of these slices. So I took his sketches and turned them into finished icons.

Interface
I also worked with Isaiah on developing the User Interface for Stacks. Below are a few of the initial ideas I came up with for the Library design and main content interface. Some were more ‘out there’ than others.

In the end we settled on the matte black Library. We also added a non-standard, classy library trigger in the lower right corner of the interface. The final UI design came out rather well, I think, and is easy to use and navigate.

Iconic
Isaiah and I were quite lucky in developing the Stacks icon. After sketching some ideas out for myself to start from I jumped right into Cinema 4D to mockup some icon ideas. Luckily these early renders were what Isaiah was looking for and the metaphor fit well with the title and functionality of the plug-in. Some of the early ideas can be seen here:

Here is the final icon we settled upon to represent Isaiah’s wonderful new plug-in.

Tags: Plug-ins, Icons, User Interface