Company Setup & Hiring

If you follow me on Twitter, you may noticed that I already setup my own design company – LoonDesign Studio back in 31st March 2010. I haven’t setup the company website yet, still thinking about the branding and the direction. But I will turn kailoon.com into my personal blog and blog about what I am doing, share my learnings via tutorials and recommend any great sites / services I’d used.

It is tired to look for programmer every time I get a new project. So far, I am working with Arzumy & Kamal who is expert in Ruby On Rails. But they are too busy with other projects as well. So, I am looking for a programmer who specialize in php or Ruby ( RoR), you can either partner with me or work for me as an employee. If you are interested, send me an email.

New Hobby

Oh ya, I just get myself a new DSLR camera. This is the first ever digital camera I ever bought in my life. Its a Nikon D5000. I am totally new in photography, so if you’re also a newbie or you love photographing. Join me on flickr. Some photos I took during a wedding ceremony.

That’s all for today.

Winners

• Andre
• iris sousa

Congrats to all the winners and we will have another contests coming soon! Stay tune!

About The Sponsor

SonicPrint is an online print company that specializes in Full Color Business Cards, Brochure Printing, and Postcard Printing. They have served businesses and designers nationwide for over 10 years with risk free printing and no cost proofing before going to press.

What You Can Win?

2 Different Winners will receive 500 Premium Full Color Business Cards Printed & Shipped For Free!

• 2 x 3.5 – premium gloss cardstock
• Full Color Both Sides
• Free Shipping Included

Terms:

• Eligibility: US Residents ONLY or if out of U.S. shipping not included.
• Must be 18 or older to enter!

How To Win?

You can win the prize by completing any one of the options below, each option will earn you an entry to the contest:

• Leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post. (1 entry)
• Add @SonicPrint and @kailoon on Twitter and tweet about the contest. (1 entry)
• We receive entry submitted before 7 September 2010.

Winners will be selected randomly using Random.org. You can enter once with each of the 4 ways for a total of 4 entries. Have fun!

In addition to the massive bundle of files, you’ll also get $50 of hosting credits for killer web host MediaTemple and $10 off any RockablePress ebook! Buy the Bundle Now!

Winners for Flash Moto CMS

• sriganesh – http://twitter.com/animhut
• jasonwalz – http://twitter.com/jasonwalz

Winners for Premium Concepts

• Adam Goldschmidt
• Steve Robillard – http://twitter.com/srpsco
• Nick Plekhanov – http://twitter.com/nickplekhanov

Congrats to all the winners and we will have another contests coming soon! Stay tune!

Flash Moto CMS

Flash Moto CMS is a revolutionary Flash content management system aimed at Flash developers and designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Flash websites.

Features

• Flash Moto CMS is the first content management system based on ActionScript 3 and realized as RIA on Flex.
• The final product of Flash CMS use is a complete user and SEO friendly Flash website with a convenient control panel.
• The website is controlled just like a standard CMS but with the extras that Flash offers.
• FlashMoto also offers a collection of Flash CMS templates that correspond to the main FlashMoto requirements.

ConceptFeedback

If you have follow LoonDesign updates, you may notice we reviewed ConceptFeedback awhile back. A few weeks ago they started offering a Premium Concept feature for users who want to get maximum exposure for their concept. Once a premium concept is live, it is featured on the homepage for 1 week, giving users maximum traffic and reviews. They also personally invite our top members (highest reputation scores) to review the concept, ensuring top quality feedback.

Tweet To Win

Tweet one of these 2:

• Tweet this to win a premium concept worth $ 9.99 USD.
• Tweet this to win a license of Flash Moto CMS worth $199USD.

Then, include your tweet in your comment in this post before 16th March 2010. We will select winners randomly. That’s it! I hope you enjoy this giveaway and don’t forget to follow us on twitter or subscribe to our RSS to get the latest updates from us!

• Grand Prize ( 100 credits ): Benard

• 2nd Prize ( 60 credits ): Keint Villarroel
• 2nd Prize ( 60 credits ): webbografico
• 2nd Prize ( 60 credits ): Niki

• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): DRAGYN
• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): Hjörtur Scheving
• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): Adzfar
• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): adamos
• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): patam

• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): GeekBlitz
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): Bert
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): Angel
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): BebopDesigne
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): gamel James
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): Cheap Logo Designs

Enjoy!

Rollip is an online professional photo effects editor. There are 40 effects for you to choose. Simply upload images and select the effect you want, then download the modified images in seconds!

How It Works?

1 credit means 1 photo to process. When your normally buy (pro) credits, you get 15 credits for $2.99 per time you charge.

Upload Process

1. Choose an effect.
2. Upload an image.
3. Done! and download the image. You will receive an email which contain the download link as a backup.

The Result

I’ve tested the effect, please take a look. I am using the Drawing Style.

Original image

Edited image

It is easy and efficient!

What You Can Win?

A total of 660 credits are ready to be giving away! You can modify an image using 1 credit from Rollip.

• 1 x 1st prize: 100 credits
• 3 x 2nd prize: 60 credits
• 5 x 3rd prize: 40 credits
• 6 x 4th prize: 30 credits

How to Win?

• Simply comment on this post using your contactable email before 30th December 2009.
• Winners will be randomly selected.

Enjoy!

ThemeForest is an Envato Marketplace. At ThemeForest you can buy and sell HTML templates as well as themes for popular CMS products like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal with prices ranging from just $5 up to $40. Items are priced on the complexity, quality and use of the file. The site is home to a bustling community of web designers and developers and is the biggest marketplace of its kind.

How to Win?

1. Head over to the post.
2. Simply comment on that post will do.
3. Write about which theme you would like to win and why? And, how are you going to use it?
4. They will randomly pick the winner for each theme.

The Characters

The Objects

Usage

These illustrations are completely free and you can use them for what ever you like including items for sale on ThemeForest and ActiveDen, all you need is a link back to this page. Enjoy!

I am always excited to be part of Envato team ( marketplace reviewer ), this time, it is even more awesome because I had the pleasure once again to work with Collis Ta’eed and the team at Envato. It is a true honor for me.

It is not an easy job to redesign such a huge network of sites, a lot of pressure on the team behind it. You will need to know what the community needs, what to be included and what not. The first time I saw the nearly finished mock of the redesign, I know that the community is going to love it. It provide lots of great features and possibilities for future implementation.

I am going to break down a few points on how I see the re-design and show you some of my drafts (logo and concept design).

The Logo

I am not sure who else is involved on logo redesign part, as far as I know. Collis is the person in charged. He contact me and show me the sample of what he want. The first impression when I saw the sample is, I like the font! Seriously, it makes a lot of sense to use that font to match the logo style and sizes. For logo, I am not really 100% re-design it but partly. If you still remember the old logo. It is an animal hiding behind the marketplace name. We keep the same concept, but this time, it is more stylish and minimal. We only show part of the animal of every logos.

New Envato Marketplaces

Here’s some screenshots of the brand new marketplaces.

What Work Did I Do?

I’m going to show you some of my early mock-ups that I sent to Collis months ago. Before you look at the mock-ups then, it’s probably interesting to know how Collis went about the project. He approached 3 designers (Liam Mckay, Aaron Lynch and I ) informing us of his master plan to give the Marketplace a refresh. He wanted a new perspective on the design and some ideas from outside of his own head.

Our brief was to create something conceptually new and fresh, and we had lot of creative freedom on that. I understand that Collis was going to take our designs and create something himself in the end. So, what he was looking for is actually idea and usability. I think it was clever approach on Collis’ part, it offered him a variety of styles from a variety of designers that he could take and shape into a fantastic design. So, aesthetic quality isn’t the major issue when doing the re-design. Below are the mocks.

My initial idea is to turn the item page into the author selling page. The priority will go for the author’s items. Then followed by related items or recommend items. Looking through the final live version I can see tiny things that could have been made as a result of my designs, but I am not sure.

Final Thought

It was a great experience to be able to directly work with Collis and such a good company. I hope to have more chances like this to learn from them. Besides, I am just too excited that I can be listed alongside with Liam Mckay and Aaron Lynch. I love their works every much!

Now that the site is all new and shiny it’s the perfect time to sign up, if you haven’t already. One account will be able to access all marketplaces and get some awesome audio, flash, templates, graphic and other digital files in low price!

Updates

1 thing I love about the new re-design is the author follow and the announcement feature exclusively for authors.

It is very straight forward, is either people like it or not. User can vote, suggest and comment. It is something “in your face”. The result, any design problems are caught earlier, ensuring that only high-quality ideas make it into launch. It saves your time in keep repeating the same process when you are going to launch a product.

I realize that there might be copyrighting issue when you publish your concepts and ideas. This is the feedback from the company founder and CEO, Andrew Follett.

There is not a whole lot we can do about copyrights that I know of. Design may be stolen, but so far we have had zero complaints and ConceptFeedback is not much different than a gallery site in that respect. Anytime a designer puts his/her work on display, there is the threat of copycats, but I think it is more of a perception than reality.

- Andrew Follett

But, there is also another way to prevent that. ConceptFeedback allows users to post concepts privately. This means they will not show up on the “public” forum and the concept is only viewable by the e-mail addresses selected (this could mean clients, co-workers, friends). You also have the option to do both, put your concept on public display and invite outside reviewers.

In my opinion, the world has changed. The way we communicate with the users is different. It is more direct and transparent. This also can be the key of success for any modern businesses. Company started to care about their user’s feeling while user’s started to demand something with quality.

A little about myself, I recently involved myself more into user experience design. It is a totally different area compare to plain web design. It makes me feel I am more close to a user rather than a designer. Majority of the users more care about the usability compare to the design. It’s extremely important to get honest feedback from the actual users and to know what they really want. So, I think ConceptFeedback can be a great place for us to improve and get closer to the community.

Why I Create This While I Can Download Others?

I am so stubborn, I don’t want to follow others! ( just kidding ). I notice that most of the CSS Grid System have lots of extra classes of elements. It is good and handy but is it really useful for your project? So, I try to create a very simple CSS Grid System just for blog or small website. So, this can be a little different from what you see in other popular framework. You can find all popular css grid system from the Grid System Generator.

Introduction

MyCSS Grid System is using the maximum of 960px width. It comes with the most common layout proportion for blogs and creative web sites. It is also using the best divine proportion in web design. This may not that useful compare to those well built css grid system but I think it somehow do the job.

How It Works?

In the download files, there are:

• index.html
• grid.css
• format.css

You can start coding your project by including the grid.css.

Codes Preview

The grid.css, I am using my name as the first and the last div (Easy to remember, every time you use this system, you will remember my name! Hehe.. So, the first div from the left has a class name “kai”, the last div on the right will has a class name “loon”. So, “kailoon to complete the work!”.

* { /* CSS reset, you can replace with your own css reset codes*/
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

.b1 { width: 640px; }
.b2 { width: 300px; }
.b1 .b1 { width: 310px; }
.g1 { width: 580px; }
.g2 { width: 360px; }
.g1 .g1 { width: 280px; }
.g2 .g2 { width: 170px; }

.col {
	float: left;
	margin: 0 10px;
	display: inline;
}

.box {
	margin: 0 auto 20px;
	width: 960px;
}

.kai { /* The first left component*/
	margin-left: 0;
}

.loon { /* The last right component*/
	margin-right: 0;
}

.clearfix:after {
	clear: both;
	content: ' ';
	display: block;
	font-size: 0;
	line-height: 0;
	visibility: hidden;
	width: 0;
	height: 0;
}

.clearfix {
	display: inline-block;
}

* html .clearfix {
	height: 1%;
}

.clearfix {
	display: block;
}

The HTML:

<div class="box clearfix">
		<h1>960px - Normal Blog Layout</h1>
		<p>960px</p>
</div>

<div class="box clearfix">
	<div class="col b1 kai">
		<p>640px</p>
	</div>
	<div class="col b2 loon">
		<p>300px</p>
	</div>
</div>

<div class="box clearfix">
	<div class="col b1 kai">
		<div class="col b1 kai">
			<p>310px</p>
		</div>
		<div class="col b1 loon">
			<p>310px</p>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="col b2 loon">
		<p>300px</p>
	</div>
</div>

<div class="box clearfix">
	<h1>960px - Golden Divine Proportion Layout</h1>
	<p>960px - The Golden Divine</p>
</div>

<div class="box clearfix">
	<div class="col g1 kai">
			<p>580px</p>
	</div>
	<div class="col g2 loon">
			<p>360px</p>
	</div>
</div>	

<div class="box">
	<div class="col g1 kai">
			<div class="col g1 kai">
				<p>280px</p>
			</div>
			<div class="col g1 loon">
				<p>280px</p>
			</div>
	</div>
	<div class="col g2 loon">
			<div class="col g2 kai">
				<p>170px</p>
			</div>
			<div class="col g2 loon">
				<p>170px</p>
			</div>
	</div>
</div>

Conclusion and Download

It is simple and easy to use as it is very specific. The CSS file size is extremely small, only 778 bytes!. You can preview the demo here. If you have any questions or you find any bugs or you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment. If you find this useful, let me see how / where you implement it. Thanks!

Winners

• John

  I run a freelancing business, and it’s quite difficult t keep track of everything, and keep organized. Let alone, guarantee my customers an honest price. If I could better track time, and be more productive, I would be more able to help serve my clients to the best of my ability. After all, in this economic downturn everyone needs to save money wherever possible.

• Matthew Craig

  As a freelance designer I would use the software to manage my time effectively, bill clients correctly and accordingly, and get feedback as to how I am doing during certain projects and what I can improve on.

• Sam

  For calculating time and amount to bill my clients.

  I have had a lots of difficulties cause of not calculating time for particular work. As the software itself says user friendly interface
  , flexible timer and able to produce invoices thats what I want on a time tracking and billing s/w application.

The winners will receive their prizes soon via email from the sponsor. Thank you everyone who participated.

This theme comes has 6 awesome colors ready for you to choose. You can also switch the sidebar position from right to left with only one single click. You also able to switch sidebar position from right to left or the other way round.

It also provide a highly demand user link feed to allow your reader to submit news, example http://psd.tutsplus.com/ and http://kailoon.com. My WordPress provide up to 9 ad slot for your needs. Include a leaderboard, 2 rectangle ad and 6 small (125px) ads.

Features:

• 6 Colors
• Feedburner Integration
• Powerful Theme Option Page
• User Link Feed Ready
• Able to switch sidebar position by a single click
• Auto image resizing
• Flickr Showcase
• Wp-navi and breadcrumb integrated
• Ad Management System
• Social Linking (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)
• Modern footer display
• Smooth tabbing system
• SuperFish for dropdown menu ( Both pages and Categories )
• Unique author and search result page
• Unique threaded comment styling
• Trackbacks and comment separated
• 2 Column Tabless (CSS Layout)
• Sidebar Widget Ready
• Gravatar ready
• Valid CSS and XHTML
• Browser compatibility: All Major Browsers
• Related Posts
• Popular Posts
• SEO Friendly
• Print Ready
• Many more!

The Idea

This is purely inspired by TUTs sites and CNET. I try to make it direct, simple, clean and effective. You can check out the demo too.

About the sponsor

Fanurio is a time tracking and billing software application, highly appreciated by freelancers for its intuitive interface, flexible timer and ability to produce detailed invoices.

Whether you need to round time, use multiple currencies or create invoices with your own layout, Fanurio has the right tools to help you get paid.

Features:

• Track time with little effort
• Analyze your performance
• Get paid for all your work
• Runs on multiple platforms

Comment To Win

• Leave a comment.
• Stated “why the application (prize) would be useful to you“.
• The most convincing posters should get the free licenses.

Terms

• Contest end on 30th April.
• Prizes will be delivered directly from the sponsor, so, please comment using your contactable Email address.

Have fun!

• Drew Douglass – 1000 free standard size business cards.

  I would use the business cards to further brand and promote my name as a freelance copywriter and php/wordpress freelancer. Thanks for running this contest, good luck to all!

• Mario Awad – 1 free 18×24 canvas print.

  I’m currently considering freelancing software development… those cards would come in handy… good luck everyone

The winners will be contacted by the sponsor very soon. Thank you everyone who participated. Don’t give up, we will have another giveaway soon!

Winners

• Heather Flyte

  I think this theme is exactly what our magazine site needs. It’s got all the features, from clean ad-placement to easy navigation between features. I think it will really help in the redesign.

• Aaron

  Like: I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to design a template that looks similar to the Tuts web designs (aka PSDtuts, Nettuts, etc); the our magazine theme looks quite similar to what I want. A+ design in my opinion.

  Usage: I’d use this theme as a starting point for my iphone game review blog/site. It’s got everything I need built right in to the default layout – video, blog, and flickr rss in the sidebar.

  Thanks and good luck with the contest!

The winners will receive their prizes soon via email. Thank you everyone who participated. Don’t give up, we will have another giveaway soon!

Update: Contest closed

Our Magazine come in 2 colors

• White-Gold (default)
• Black-Red

Features

• FEATURED UP TO 7 CATEGORIES:
• Slider headline. Optional to be semi-auto or fully control.
• 4 categories under tabbing.
• Video category.
• 1 Blog alike display category.

• AUTOMATIC IMAGE RESIZING:
• Automatic thumbnail resizing for headline, blog posts and posts listing.
• Using WordPress Media Upload (Strongly recommended) or custome field ( priority to be displayed ).

• POWERFUL THEME OPTION:
• Select the theme color.
• Easy to select featured categories for each section.
• Disable / Enabled categories to be displayed in front page.
• Feedburner feed replacement and optional to display in text.

• USER LINK FEED:
• Easy to setup your own user link feed page.
• Example http://psd.tutsplus.com/ and http://kailoon.com

• UNIQUE ARCHIVES PAGE TEMPLATE:
• Using accordian:
• http://themetation.com/demo/magazine/archives/

• FLEXIBILITY AND FUNCTIONS:
• Almost every elements in front page can be disable or enable.
• Headline, Blog alike and Video category are excluded in recent post section in front page.

• MORE FEATURES:
• Smooth dropdown menu (Category)
• Easy to navigate page menu
• Threaded comment ( up to level 3) and paged comments supported.
• Unique design for comment area.
• Comments and tracbacks separation using tabbing.
• Integrated wp-navi and breadcrumb.
• Widget ready.
• Flickr ( Download plugin to make it works).

Requirements:

• Required php5 and curl enable (for the feed count).

Rules

• Leave only 1 comment here about how are you going to use this theme and what make you love this theme.
• Please post only one comment per person, duplicated comments will be deleted and void.
• Comment box will be accepted until 18^th March 2009, and we’ll randomly generate 2 winners.
• Winners will be contacted via email, so, please leave your comment with your contactable email address.

The Artwork

The Products