New Hand Drawn Blog Design on Leland.info
18Say bye bye to the Simply Minimal theme, and say hello to this new hand-drawn-style blog design on Leland.info. It was designed by Keith Donaldson (including all the custom drawings and icons). It also uses the Pointy font, designed by Pointy Design, for the headings rendered through Cufon. I, of course, coded the design into the WordPress theme you now see on the site.
I’m not sure why, but I’ve been a fan of hand-drawn-style designs lately. After seeing Keith’s hand-drawn icon set (previously linked) I thought I would contact him about making a minimal hand-drawn-style blog design for Leland.info. I think it turned out pretty nice.
By the way, Keith has also designed a number of themes for Theme Lab, including Cool Stripes, Photabulous, and Bravissimo (XHTML/CSS only).
Maybe if enough people like it, I could create a generic version of the theme for release. Love it or hate it? Let me know in the comments. It’s also a work in progress, you may see me adding/removing different things over time.
And yes, I know the social bookmarking icons below the posts don’t work. Do people actually use those anymore? Clicking social bookmarking icons, not the actual social bookmarking sites.
Personally im not a big fan of the hand drawn stuff, but what ever floats your boat
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In saying that, its nice and simple, straight to the point. Hope people like it =)
Yeah lol, I wasn’t a big fan either…for some reason I suddenly started liking it though. Thanks for the comment.
It’s pretty darn cool seeing something come to life like this
Shame the smilies are normal WP ones.
Make ‘em hand-drawn, and you’d have no idea it was a normal blog :3
Interesting idea. Wonder if there’s a hand-drawn smiley set I could use, and if there’s a way to include them in the theme (to override the default ones).
I love it so much I was toying with something like this for my own personal blog – because I doodle and take handwritten notes a LOT, so family would be quite pleased.
…wow. Totally, honestly loving it. The hand-drawn font is mighty awesome and is a great choice.
Simply brilliant. Keith shows an open mind. This is an excellent use of hand drawn elements to engage a freethinking and/or younger audience.
We have come to expect websites to look technical to the point of being rubber-stamped. Including hand drawn elements is an easy way for web designers to make their interface more artistic, less technical and more personalized.
The “doodles” make it feel like a sheet torn out of someone’s school notebook. This makes the site appeal to a more creative audience. Kudos
really awesome design and very well coded! Great job both Keith and Leland!
Thanks so much for the kind words everyone, glad you all like it!
Just curious, does Keith have a blog? The link doesn’t lead to a blog. It leads to icons. One of which gives an error message: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8i DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Server at keithydee.com Port 80. I assume that may have been his blog.
I think Keith did have a blog on keithydee.com, but that seems to be gone now.
Maybe Keith could enlighten us? lol
Yeah, I’m just slowly picking up where I left off
I wasn’t sure what the problem was. There were many varibles.
Thank you for that info. =]
Love it!! I love anything that looks rough and done by hand.
One thing: it might just be my computer being stupid, but the comment “send” button has the cool hand drawn “send” but also there is a text “submit” on top of it…
But it looks great!!
Carly, can you let me know what browser and OS you’re using?
Glad you like it!
Now this is cool. Probably one of the more unique designs I’ve ever seen.
Thumbs up for the design – really like it!