Archive for the ‘Portfolio’ Category
| 24 Feb 2009 |
I finally sold the adult video sharing design! |
I made this design a year ago for a customer who ended up not paying because he apparently ran out of money. Anyway ever since i tried to sell it, but was unsuccessful. A week ago a potential customer popped up so i messaged him and voila he loved it and bought it instantly!
I sold the design at the initial price i asked one year ago – $195
As you can see the design is really sleek and ordered, along with ad optimization for maximum CTR. As you can see pink(slutty pink) and black are the dominant colors, excellent for an adult video sharing website. The psd itself is huge due to the lots and lots of layers and filters used: it has 55mb, and its cache is almost 7GB(meaning that you can’t open it if you don’t have 7GB free disk space).
Phew. I finally got rid of it. This is what happens if a customer doesn’t pay! You get stuck with the design for a very long time.
| 17 Sep 2008 |
Custom WordPress design for 1800PocketPC.com |
To tell you from the start this design was a tricky one, mostly the phone’s design, i worked like 4 hours on it including the customer’s revisons, till i got everything like he wanted to look. Designing is hard when you have to completely fulfill someone’s strict requirements.
Overall it’s very easy to design a theme. The harder part is to come up with the concept and the color combination along with the elements arrangement. Before starting work on a design i ask each and every customer what color combination does he want, how many sidebars, extra elements that he requires and any other info that he thinks would be useful to achieve the design he desires.
Also it’s great to talk to a customer via Instant messenger, the customer can do faster revisions, and communication is also a lot better.
George from 1800PocketPC.com checked on me like 1-4 times a day to ask for improvements and previews in order to get what he wanted. It was really great chatting with him, he was a great customer.
Here’s George’s feedback:
I recently had the pleasure of working with Tom from thaslayer.com, I had a vision for a new WordPress theme and he brought it to life. Now my blog has a unique theme and it can stand out from the rest. His price was way better than some of the other design companies I approached. The design was completed very quickly and professionally, and there was constant communication between us so I could approve all the elements in the design of the theme. It was a pleasure working with u mate.
Saijo George www.1800PocketPC.com
PS:The phone looks mat because if i would have made it light-reflective and glassy looking it would have looked like an iPhone, now George has his own custom made pocketPC design which contains the posts.
Customer Name: George
Timeframe: 72 hours
Job overview: Custom wordpress design for a Pocket PC blog
Price: 340$
| 8 Aug 2008 |
Custom design for ShareUrFiles file hosting website |
The owner of ShareUrFiles.com posted up a job on DP forums regarding the redesign of his wbsite. Guess what? I was the designer who was chosen for the job, and I think he made a pretty good choice, don’t you?
Although my design is not live yet it will be live soon hopefully.
The customer wanted a clean look along with all the features of the script taken in consideration + Ad optimization and a custom logo.
I did everything as he requested and he really liked my work saying that i outdone myself 
.
The thing that i really like about the overall deisgn is that it looks very clean and spacy giving the user a sensation of flexibility.
Trust me on this guys, light blue with light green looks SICK(great) and it combines very smoothly with the gray top part.
I chose to make the logo black to get it into the spotlight and added orange/red icons to express some warm colors next to it.
Customer Name: DrMerc
Timeframe: 24 hours
Job overview: Design a custom File hosting website Front-end
Price: 180$
| 4 Jun 2008 |
Custom newspaper style wordpress design |
This is the first newspaper styled theme that i designed, and everything went pretty smooth thanks to the great cooperation of the customer.
The customer requested the main color to be light blue, and to have a 2 columned theme which is also ad-optimized.
I fulfilled his requests, and used a sleek bright blue as a main color, with a light bolded gray background.
He also requested a box where a youtube video is shown, so i incorporated that also, along with a small icon.
The 2 main posts on top which have the american flag next to them are featured posts, he originally requested the featured post boxes to be black, but i talked him out of it because the black boxes would have messed up the color harmony in the theme.
The outcome looks better than i expected. Really. I wouldn’t have used grey as a background, but the customer insisted upon its usage. The usage of a white background would have raised the contrast of the elements, and the theme would have looked much better, but eh, he’s the customer.
For the body of the boxes i used a light blue/grey gradient, and didn’t close the bottom of the boxes fading the colors in the bottom of each box.
This theme is a good example on that 2 columned themes can compete in quality, and monetization with 3 columned themes 
.
Customer Name: WorldMan
Timeframe: 72 hours
Job overview: Creation of a custom web 2.0 newspaper style wordpress theme
Price: Private
| 11 Apr 2008 |
Custom vBulletin design for an Adult Forum |
Yes, the forum is Adult topic oriented, but my job didn’t have anything to do with xxx pictures, or stuff like that. I just did the design itself, how the buyer will customize it and what items he will add to it it’s his problem.
Here are the client’s specifications:
The forum I need a design for is an adult forum. The domain is NSFWForum. The design I have in my head is a black theme with a logo that has a red circle through “SFW”…I’m absolutley open to ideas of course! I just want it to look good.
Let me know if you’d be willing to do this.
My suggestion:
yeah, of course i can do it, i don’t really care about the niche of the sites that i design, it’s still designing after all
hmm, adult forum how does this sound: black background, pink and grey web 2.0 colors
Said and done. The job was completed within a 72 hour time frame(he told me last week that he will have funds to pay me on wednesday), so i took my time and chilled i did each part of the design on different days.
Check out the designs:
Ben(the customer) just loved it
Hey,
The design looks awesome! Payment of $250 sent, as promised.
Please email the file(s) to [email address]
Thanks again,
Ben
Its a great feeling to see a customer happy, and especially getting the payment, because you know that you have to rely on that money(i have to revamp my father’s apartment so i can rent it, and everything costs money nowadays).
Customer Name: Ben
Timeframe: 72 hours
Job overview: Design a vBulletin design for an adult forum
Price: $250
| 21 Mar 2008 |
WordPress Theme design for World Of Scooters |
This is the second theme that i designed for Robbie. The first theme was for his trampolines blog, of which you can check out more details by Clicking HERE .
The design was made for his Scooter Blog. This is the second concept, the first one was dark(blue+black) and he told me that he wants something clean, pleasant to the eye and easy to navigate.
The job was completed within a 48 hour timeframe(along with revisions and coding.
Coding was done by BETng4U (damn its good to have him back) which went really smooth.
I used a combination of blue/orange/white. Robbie specified that he wants a white background so he got one!. To put a bit of life in the theme i used 2 stock images from iStockPhoto. The main purpose of the blue and orange is to adjust the contrast of the theme(if i would have used grey for example instead of blue the theme would have looked extremely monoton).
The header image is made out of 2 parts:
- The left part with the guy on scooter and the logo - i used myriad roman font for the logo, it’s one of my favorite fonts next to Century gothic and scriptina.
- The right part with the testimonial and the guy from the scooter showing thumbs up - a testimonial is really important at these type of sites/blogs. It can really motivate a potential customer to buy a product.
To see the live design visit www.worldofscooters.co.uk
Customer Name: Robbie
Timeframe: 48 hours
Job overview: Design and code a wordpress theme for a scooter blog
Price: Confidential
| 26 Feb 2008 |
Custom wordpress design for a Trampolines blog |
2 days ago Robbie contacted me to design him a custom wordpress design for his Trampolines blog where he will advertise the trampolines he’s selling.
He asked me to design him a fun design and that he wants to target mostly parents. So i designed a fun banner which is attractive to both kids and parents.
Here’s the main concept of the banner:
in the left corner there are 2 kids who are having fun on the trampoline, with other kids waiting in line
the sun is shining bright and from the right part kids are hurrying to also jump around with a happy mom and dad recommending the service
if i would put an other trampoline than this concept would get messed up because the running kids would have an other place to go to
To create the banner i used lots of stock illustrations(the good thing is that they are royalty-free and you just buy them once and use them forever) and i brushed a lot to get everything look like it’s one piece.
I used 2 fonts from 2 different categories to make the logo:
- MarkerFeltThin-PlainMarkerFeltThin-Plain which is from the handwriting category for “Fantastic Fun”
- Myriad Pro Semibold-Condensed for the “Great fun all summer for every kid” tagline.
Basically the main purpose of the design is to be as appealing as possible and to attract as many customers as possible. This is why i incorporated a testimonial box right in the top of the sidebar.
For the sidebar element titles i used a red rectangle and at every important element i varied the text color to make the design as fun as possible.
I had a rough time thinking out the concept of the posts and mostly i couldn’t think of a cool timestamp background image, but then i remembered that i saw a stock photo with kids and adults holding banners in their hands and one of them matched perfectly the design, so i used it.
To display the comments i made a talk bubble, nothing fancy, but cool.
This design is a great example on how important stock images and stock illustrations are in a webdesigner’s life. They can help create a bright, cheerful design which wouldn’t be possible without the use of them.
Robbie was extremely satisfied with my work and he said that he will have more projects for me in the future:
Robbie: am off for food, thankyou very much for your help tom. will be in contact in the near future for more
The coding of the theme will be done by Naif, i already contacted him about this project and i can’t wait to see my design go live
| 27 Jan 2008 |
WordPress Design for MoneyBites.com – Make money online blog |
More and more people contact me to design them wordpress themes for their Make money online niche blogs. Quite many of them would want the design done for the price of 30-50$, but those people get a big NO as a reply.
My current fee for a custom wordpress design is 170$, you can’t say that i overcharge, i saw designs that cost 400-500$ and they can’t match the quality of my designs.
On wednesday Max Teitelbaum contacted me to design a wordpress theme for his new blog: MoneyBites.com
He supplied the icon in front of the logo and told me that he wants space for 125x12px ads, and a spot for subscriptions to his feed along with the feedburner widgets integrated.
He also specified that he wants the design to be AD-Optimised and the main colors should be silver and blue along with a web 2.0 feel.
Overview of the Logo:
The Icon was supplied by the customer, he supplied 2 versions of the icon: a silver one and a gold one. I decided to use the silver one to fit the concept of the top-part of the design.
The main font that i used is Myriad Roman Font along with the silver gradient from the web 2.0 gradient pack made by dezinerfolio and a few font style tweaks.
The main idea was to create a sleek logo that would fit the top part of the design that would blend in perfectly with the other elements.
Overview of the design:
The customer requested that i put recent posts and popular posts above the content. Said and done. I implemented the icons provided by the customer in the sidebar elements.
At the posts i used a bit green for the tags and the posted by lines to have some diversity and to not create color blindness to the visitor.
The other icons i used are the icons from FAMFAMFAM (his icons are widely used on the web and they are used by popular sites like stumbleupon also)
In the footer i put a grey bar with 40% opacity(what do you know? it turned out great) On the left part i put the golden icon of the website and on the right part the powered by wordpress line(the font is arial).
The job was completed within 48 hours(including revisions), this is the bad part of working with customers who live in a time zone far away from you. You can talk to them once, max twice a day.
| 13 Jan 2008 |
Custom wordpress theme for an atheist blog |
You can check out a live preview by clicking HERE
Last week i was hired by aufordboy to design and code a Custom WordPress template for an atheist blog, when we set the details he specified that he wants something similar to the 15 year old entrepreneur theme
From the start i told him that i can’t design him a theme that will look exactly the same as a previous theme of mine. He told me the specifications, but most of all requested that the theme should be a 3 column theme( 1 sidebar on the left, one on the right and in the center the content).
Here are the details he gave me about the project:
- Prefer 3 columns (with main content in middle) but will consider 2 column designs. Would like “custom pages” navigation bar to be under (or integrated in) the header image.
- For WordPress 2.3
- Coded
- XHTML/CSS valid
- tested on FF,IE6/7,Safari,Opera
- widget ready for sidebar and footer
- custom header image (something for an atheist website)
After he gave me these details i asked him about the logo, that what would he prefer? a cross or something or a character. We agreed that as a main detail i will use a character. I went over to Istockphoto and found a great vector image that i used along with atheist taglines like: “God? Heaven? Hell? Afterlife?” , also after the timestamp on posts i put an atheist symbol(clean, sharp looking).
As you can see in the previews the theme looks very clean, the arrangement of the elements and the navigation bar make it unique.
As he requested the footer(where recent posts/comments and ads are) is widget ready along with the sidebar.
When i showed him a preview of the theme he loved it and accepted that it looks better as a 2 column theme(i explained that if i add one more column on the right the content will be in a very tight space)
This project went really smooth, and all this thanks to the cooperation of the customer and the professionalism with which he threated the project.
| 3 Dec 2007 |
My first forum design |
Yep, last friday the owner of www.mariogame.info hired em to do a stylish design for his mario forum. He wanted me to incorporate the logo on the front page….well i tried and i tried and it didn’t look good so i decided to design a custom logo.
The design is extremely styleish and is a combination of red/grey/white and teal gradient. The only thing that i used from the old site was the background gradient(just so that it would contain an element from the main page).
At first i wanted to make a dark design with a big black gradient header and for the main colors to use white+grey+black and maybe some green along with the logo provided by him.
But when i made a part of the design i realized that green won’t fit the design and it won’t look good so i deleted everything and started from beginning. So i used as a background the gradient from main page and created the main structure.
We live in the XXI century! Web 2.0 is dominating on the www so i added stripes and used web 2.0 gradients.
The main fonts i used are Arial, Tahoma, Verdana and for the logo Century Gothic (this is one of my favorite fonts).
As main icons i incorporated Mario and Toad.
He was very satisfied with my work and i’m glad that the theme turned out so good(even better than i expected).
I lost quite many forum design jobs because i didn’t have forum designs in my portfolio. That won’t be a problem anymore since i added this design to my portfolio and hopefully i will catch more forum design jobs.
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Yesterday the owner contacted me asking for the NON watermarked files. I was like wtf? so i pmed him back showing him how to remove the watermark from the PSD file. He PM’ed me back saying that the coder told him that the psd contains only one layer and the watermark can’t be removed.
My reply was: “the psd has only 1 layer? what program is he using? MS paint?”
I would be afraid to give my design to a coder like that, lol. I just hope he won’t mess up my design, you know what they say: “everything is ok if it turns out well at the end”
If you want to check out other parts of the design(postbit, threadbit) visit http://thaslayer.com/view/index.php?list=11
