One of the reasons why this site has been so neglected with no new content is that I/we’ve been incredibly busy with a few projects. The one I’m announcing in this post, is the birth of eFrog Digital Design – our brand new premium WordPress theme shop.

Another theme shop. Yeah. But while there are dozens of generic theme shops all over the web, we are a little different. I’m obviously biased in saying we have some good talent here, so visit the site to see what I mean. And we have George for goodness sake! George is the frog, and our mascot :)

This post has been in my drafts for a while, so I’ve had to edit a bit to make it seem like its news on the bleeding edge. Well, bleeding edge for me meaning not too old for purpose :P A lot of people that check this blog will already know about eFrog, but remember that its still news if its news to you.

So have a click around the site. Let us know what you think. We always love any feedback. I’m very proud of the team that made it happen. To you guys: Sue Rutherford, Christopher Mills, Mark Bloomfield, Barry Roodt, André van Rooyen & Rou Mills, I tip my hat and raise my glass. Heres to a great future of continually producing awesome themes.

Who doesn’t love fridge magnets?

Its getting colder here in the south. Winter is starting to wink before she starts ticking nervously. While I didn’t really intend the fridge to symbolize that, I’m now going to claim it on reflection.

You can grab your resolution from the post on the Forge site.

I don’t know that much about ballet.

I did go to a touring Russian ballet with my Mom and Gran when I was a little tike. And although I don’t remember much, it did leave an impression on me. Maybe it was pre-puberty tiny sparks of hormones yet to come that kept me still in my seat glaring at those girls. But I’d prefer to think that it captivated me because it was art, it was imagination, it was beauty.

And as unusual as you might think that is for a boy, that’s nothing compared to my brother. Him being the eldest, I didn’t witness it, but I’ve heard family members recount the grinning story many times. If ever there was any ballet on TV, you were very likely to witness my brother dancing around, oblivious to the world in improvised bare-bottomed pirouettes. When my parents asked him why he had no clothes on, he would point at the TV and tell them that thats the way its done. Obviously all three year old boys think that beige tights codpieces are what they will grow into, so to speak. I don’t want to name my brother here because he might be embarrassed.

So although a silly embarrassing story is more than enough reason for a blog post in my book, the main reason for this post is to point your attention to an imminent death. The Cape Town City Ballet Company will bow to its last encore shortly if there isn’t a miracle. After more than 75 years on operation, without more funding it simply cant go on.

Since this is so close to the heart of The Forge we have launched a campaign to try our utmost to help keep this art form going for future generations. It going to need a miracle, but it can be done. And you could win an Apple 16GB iPad just by spreading the word. Visit the Campaign site now and make a difference for a worthy cause.

Nice and late, I broke the wallpaper theme for the year, and it feels good.

Something more vector inspired this month. Sorry if you don’t like yellow. I say try all colours on for size once in a while – most of them offer something.

Here is an overview of what it looks like with the calendar:

Pity down-sampling to fit the post pixelates it so badly, but hopefully you get the idea. Also, I spent a little more time on the iPhone version this month, so check that out if you have one.

Once again you can grab your preferred resolution from The Forge site.

Sorry if you’re old school enough to like your content fresh and helpful, but this post is just my self indulgent way of documenting stuff.

The team I work with is quite small (but awesome!), and project work flow generally goes faster if the design and front-end development isn’t both done by me. Since at the moment I’m the only one doing front-end, unfortunately I don’t really get to design websites as often as I would ideally like. Although, changes are a-brewing, which will free me to do more design work, which I’m chomping at the bit to do.

I know you care deeply…

So even though Cape Accommodation‘s redesign went live a long time ago, and looking at it now there are already quite a few things I’d change – I’m putting it up here because I designed it. I warned you it was self indulgent :)

The original site looked like this:

Almost 10 years old, the site acted as mainly a feeder directory for a more substantial site. With no database (yes, that meant manual updating of HTML), and an almost unusable navigation that listed endless properties by only one criteria at a time, it was my job to come up with something that was way more current, usable, and added lots of functionality.

Using WordPress and with a design brief that I had to use the colours orange and blue (honestly, not my favourite colour combination) I tried to keep it as clean as possible while still giving it some vibrancy.

The most important functionality to add was for decent ways to search for accommodation on the site. It needed to be able to drill down from multiple search criteria. Since WordPress isn’t brilliant at this, I was grateful for the SQL and PHP skillz of colleague Christopher Mills to get this vibing. Apart from that I introduced a visual way of searching where possible with JQuery thumbnails for regions & activities, advertisement slots, and a JQuery featured property section in the sidebar, amongst a bunch of other cool stuff.

So to you, the legend who read till the end of this post, I salute you. You poor bastard.

Seems like the design section on this site is being owned by things that are released on The Forge.

Sorry, cant help that – just so busy. But we are doing some quite cool things and releasing some nice freebies.

Greyzed is a fully widgetized grungy WordPress theme. Completely free with a strong style and lots of features. We released it today to coincide with our tenth birthday. Visit the theme page to get all the features, view a demo and download.

Took this shot of Rocky, resident Burmese cuteness at The Forge. I thought he deserved a wallpaper.

If you want to download it just head over to The Forge. There should be a size that fits your screen resolution.

More Sea. Sorry. Just a by-product of spending more time there.

And yeah this is another black & white. I was tempted with colour for a little minute because the sky actually looked quite awesome. I do love black & white though. Colour tends to hit first – if you strip the colour, you sometimes reveal more subtleties. Things I like.

Another one from the vault.

The sensor on my Canon G9 interpreted the light in its own cool way, much more interesting than the real scene.

So this one is pretty much unedited.

A really old photo. What I plan to do is slowly migrate some of my old shots from my dormant Flickr account.

The two things I like the most (apart from showcasing the sexiest set of knees on the West Coast) is how the shot has become abstract, and I also like the shape of the negative space.