This is my latest project which i finished yesterday. Things went really smooth(although i had to fully redo the bottom part of the theme) and the design was completed in a total time of about 10-11 hours,thanks to the good communication with Desmong(the customer).

My favorite part is the footer part, i really like the way the green blends with the dark blue and white

Its great to have the possibility to chat using an IM client with a customer: you can write suggestions and get feedback in real time, so this way if you screw up a part of the design thanks to the high number of feedbacks that you can ask during a session you can correct it and not continue doing something the customer won’t like.

Here are the first guidelines that i got from Desmond:

Niche is Diet pills.
Right now I’m thinking 3 columns would be good.
Here’s a template that I really like:
http://www.phentramin-customer-reviews.com/

As far as color scheme, maybe something along the lines of this:

The next day i got back to him, and in the bottom part i put 3 columns: Recent posts, Recent comments, Popular posts. I worked like 20 mins on that part.

Here’s the feedback i got:

okay i whipped up a littel sketch of what im looking for. 1. im thinking do away with the doctor 2. at the bottom i dont need recent post ect and replace those with top 3 product spaces, trying to stay away from the standard blog post theme and go more for a typical .com or something 3. content area in the center area or something with additional nav column on the left 4. if possible, mabe a small ad column on the right?

I know some guys who would have abandoned the customer on sight if they would have got a reply like this, but if you constantly abandon customers you loose your reputation and your skills wont improve. Trust me on this guys, negative criticism is good, because it will help you improve your skills.

We talked over the details and after a while i showed Desmond the design.

Check out his reaction:

D C: OMG
D C: im in love!
D C: thats niiice

The feeling to see a customer satisfied is priceless and boosts your morale sky high!

The theme turned out real great, and after a few smaller revisions it got better. Desmond decided to change the doctor team stock image to a fitness girl. So i did, but i still think the theme looks better with the med team on it, and thats the way i included it into my portfolio.

The transaction went really smooth, i got the money and sent him the fully layered and well organized PSD file.(yet an other tip for the noobie designers - always organize the PSD in groups(header/footer/content/etc) and provide it that way. In case the customer wants to edit something he needs to easily find the layer to edit)

Desmond’s review:

“This is the guy to have do your templates. He’s professional, quick, and creative. He worked with me until the template looked exactly how I wanted to look. Bottom line is he does great work. I will be using him in the future.”

Although the design is sold comments are always welcome.

Customer Name: Desmond

Timeframe: 72 hours

Job overview: Design a custom sleek looking Wordpress theme for a diet pills blog

Price: 240$

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

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

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

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

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 125×12px 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.

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.

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

Last week i was hired to make a directory design for www.ultimateblogdirectory.com The old design looked

like a design from ‘95. The client wanted something fresh yet web 2.0 and simple(check picture). First of all i started thinking about a color combination so i decided to use a combination of green/blue/yellow/grey/orange and the usual stripes.

Check out his preferences:

It needs to be 3 column with the right and left columns available for adds and sponsored links.

Center colum would have categories, on the front page the center should have a place for ads or featured sites above the categories.

It should be a rounded web 2.0 style.

At the menu i designed a light blue hover that really blends into the design.

For the logo i used a cut lemon and added mirror effect to it, making it the symbol of the directory.

The coder didn’t design it quite as it is in my design, but in my opinion he did a good job although he omissed some elements, but 2 things that really matter are that the theme is XHTML and CSS valid

You can check out a working demo at www.ultimateblogdirectory.com

How did the Styleicious template get created?
Well yesterday and today i didn’t have much custom work to do, i finished all the custom designs that had to be finished and i got myself a big mug of coffee and yesterday night i started working on the template. The template is finished(the design itself) BUT to make sure everyone likes it and to improve it more i posted it on Digitalpoint for some reviews and suggestions. You can check out the thread at Stylicious Reviews The template has a very sleek look, and will have implemented lots of exciting plugins and features.

Lets check them out more detailed:

great looking web 2.0-ish logo

2 columns for you to have place to put extra content

WidgetBucks and Adsense READY!

widgetized sidebars

AJAX rating system

Thread tags

Tag Cloud

Recent posts and recent comments display

AJAX based Poll system integrated

great looking post display and commenting system

XHTML & CSS Valid

Great hover effects!

And last but not least : it will be 100% compatible with Wordpress v 2.3!

You will be able to download the template starting from 24th October(Wednesday), if the release gets delayed you can be sure that i will let you know.

Update(25th october):

The release is delayed to 30th october due to some problems. I had some problems at designing, but eventually everything came out right. The template is being coded as we speak, lets hope we won’t have any more problems.

Update(30th october):

 The release is further delayed due to coding problems(problem with the coder…needed to change him). But now i’m working with a good friend who tends to add more ajax features to it.

Read more in The Delay Thread 

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If you are interested in hiring me for a custom job feel free to send an email to slayer@webarea.ro