Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

We’re happy to provide content that people find interesting or useful. And lately, interesting or useful includes texture packs, blogger templates, and desktop wallpapers. We used a complex system of fake math incorporating pageviews and downloads to come up with this top 10 list of our most popular content:

10. Free Texture Pack: Beach

With so many great textures out there, and great texture resources, there is often huge gaping holes in themes and subject matter that seem so obvious when you’re walking around and looking at your environment. This Beach texture pack was an attempt to close up one of those holes and we’re glad other people have found it useful.

9. Web Design Cost Calculator

The web designer cost calculator started out as a tool adapting the calculations discussed in a post in Smashing Magazine into a spreadsheet from which we could derive quotes to give to our own clients. After finishing the spreadsheet, we decided to make it available to everyone and we’re glad that so many people have found it useful as well.

8. Free Blogger Template Pack: Steampunk

Adapted from a WordPress theme used on jazzsequence.com for a long time, this template pack includes variations of the same basic template and layout with different geek and steampunk background images.

7. Free Blogger Template: dear Audrey

A feminine Blogger template that’s not too girly, this design has a vintage letter-writing theme that we like quite a lot.

6. Free Desktop Wallpaper: urbanshamanism

A dark and mysterious wallpaper, this design played with mysticism and the spirit realm and tried to adapt those to a warm, grungy, urban environment.

5. Free Desktop Wallpaper: Timeflower

One of our favorite wallpapers, this started out as a present for Chris from Erin which we adapted and made available to everyone.

4. Free Blogger Template: Polkadot Prince

3. Free Blogger Template: Polkadot Princess

Coming in 3rd and 4th respectively for downloads and pageviews are our brother and sister themes Polkadot Princess and Polkadot Prince. Essentially the gender-themed equivalent of its’ sibling, these two look great together and stand alone beautifully also. Our little 4 year old boy loves the Prince theme with the robots and airplanes, so we consider that a ringing endorsement!

2. Free Blogger Template: Last Bit of Summer

The warm colors of this Blogger template are thematic of the end of the summer and beginning of fall. We like this one so much, we were test-driving this template on one of our side project blogs for a while.

1. Free Blogger Template: Grandma’s Hat Box

Our first Blogger template and still the most downloaded by a wide margin. We took our penchant for creating unique web sites with real textures and applied that to the Blogger platform. We’re always excited to stumble on a site that uses Grandma’s Hat Box.

When we first started doing website design about a year and a half ago, I was still working full time doing Tier 2 escallation technical support on Windows servers and client PCs for a major grocery chain.  I started doing freelance contract work for a local hosting company with a large outsource design department.  When I started to see the potential to turn that into a full-time job, I quit my cushy, salaried, tech support job with good benefits to work from home, with no benefits, and took on a part-time job at Whole Foods Market.  This time, I wasn’t in a corporate office, but out on the floor, throwing freight with the Grocery team, and then later, being a bit more visual, creating displays and cutting and wrapping cheese in the Specialty department.

Between the freelance, contracted design work, building up our own design studio as ThinkTank Studio, and working at Whole Foods, Erin and I had one day off a week.  If we were lucky.  And we often worked 12 hour days.

Earlier this year, we relaunched our business as Arcane Palette Creative Design.  It was more than just a name change.  Part of the transition was a vow to do what we love doing, and to choose not to do things that we are not excited about.  One of the things this included was no longer doing outsource design work for other people — there were a lot of sites we did that we put some of our best work into, and it got branded with someone else’s name.  If we’re going to put our best work out there, we want to be able to claim it.

Now we move into a new phase.

This last weekend was my last at Whole Foods.  Now I can devote 100% of my attention and energy into Arcane Palette.  This is an exciting thing, something that just struck me suddenly last night.  It’s always been something that both of us have dreamed of to work for ourselves, doing something we love doing.  Honestly, part of me never really believed that was a real possibility.  But here we are, we’re doing it, we’re making our business succeed and not accepting failure.  Even now, with this economy, we have been able to push forward to a point in which it was no longer possible to grow further as long as I had another job.  It is liberating to sit here and know that I really am the only boss of me and that my work week is made up of design and coding for Arcane Palette.  I can’t tell you how rewarding it feels to know that we literally built this from nothing and now it’s our full-time gig.  It makes you really believe the old adage that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.

Thanks, McFly.

Welcome to the world of freelancing:  one week we’re struggling, with no projects on the horizon.  Reality chose that week for my monitor of 8 years to finally die, and I’ve been using the MacBook for designing since (which isn’t ideal since the color isn’t as good and changes depending on what angle the monitor is at), and we don’t really have the resources to get a new monitor yet.  But lo, this week we scored a few really exciting projects.  So look for the sites we made to expand over the next couple of weeks.

I changed the portfolio to use a really awesome gallery by Airtight Interactive, so you should head over to their site and give them lots of business and money because they deserve it.