Carbon Silk » Design

Panoramic – open source web template

James Broad — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:55:16 +0000

It’s been a while since releasing an open source web template, the last one being Mighty, added back in January of 2007. Mighty was a template created to allow others to take a basic design and allow them to modify most aspects of the template with relative ease (given some CSS understanding).

Time moved on and the itch arose again to create another open source web template. This time its called Panoramic. Panoramic is the name of the family business and this template design stemmed from a mock for the company I had created some time ago that never got released.

GitHub seemed the best hosting location for an open source web template, owing to its fantastic interface and functionality and thus Panoramic lives there: http://github.com/kulor/panoramic/tree/master.

Having the template hosted on a Revision Control System such as GitHub, has many advantages, the main one being that others can contribute to the code and or fork to a version that suits them. Additionally, users downloading the code can always rest assured they are getting the latest code and can see what has changed over time.

If you do use the Panoramic template, please add a comment to this page stating where it is in use, so others can gain inspiration for it’s uses.

Previous Carbon Silk designs

James Broad — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 11:57:41 +0000

Dark ‘designer’ edition

This was the design set for Carbon Silk, however I felt that the dark site took away the focus of the content and thus continued with a minimal white design.

Grid long header edition

I was particularly happy with this design, it displayed a very unique, and distinctive grid that seemed to balance particularly well.

Grid square logo edition

An iteration of the previous design, toying with a square logo, which proved to be problematic with the outlined grid structure.

Dark minimalist edition

A fresh look at designing with a dark background allowing more space for the content to breathe. Again, I felt the light-on-dark failed to do the content justice.

Here’s one I made earlier

James Broad — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 23:53:43 +0000

A design from what was intended to be a web application that never made it past the prototype stage. Reflection was intended to allow users to post questions with answers which would then generate tests to help users remember topic points.

Instead of letting this design (which I defined to be quality work) die a horrible death, I envisioned Reflection to become an Open Source web template. Unfortunately, I never did manage to follow this pursuit, so instead it settled with a showcase here.

Hopefully some day soon I will devote enough time to publish this and other designs to the Open Source world.

Five Minimal Inspirational Design Sites

James Broad — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:39:46 +0000

A small selection of sites that have caught my attention for being particularly well designed. The minimal nature of web design is something that i find extremely hard to pull off, and as such i have been inspired by these and similar such sites to create this site.

Astheria

Type Sites

We Are Only Human

Creative And Live

Icon Eye

How packaging design should be

James Broad — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:30:46 +0000

A great example of just being ‘honest’ and realising that you don’t need to dilute the message of what your product is, with all singing, all dancing colours and fancy graphics.

I can understand that there is a requirement for packaging to stand out over competing products, but this example of modest design, in my eyes, will promote trust and therefore, I will likely repeat purchase.