Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

This Blogger template, Striking Resemblance, uses real cloth textures and objects to create a lovely backdrop to your blog. It’s a little bit antique, a little bit modern and completely full of charm. Striking Resemblance uses a rich palette of turqoise and fuschias to lend invitation to the luxurious knit and woven textures and uses antique jewelry, ribbon and buttons to accent the design. Designed at the height of summer, I was drawn to the textures of comfort and decorations reminiscent of my childhood. The buttons, especially were a personal touch for me, as a favorite summer pastime was emptying my mom’s bag of buttons and combing through them for forgotten treasures.

Buy Striking Resemblance — $15

Dirty Creative is two designers who wanted to start a design blog to eventually promote their brand and design work.  Their mission statement: perpetuate creativity.  We took the project looking at sites like Smashing Magazine, PSD Tuts+, Anthem, and core77 for the kind of site that they were trying to build.  As such, we were really excited to take part in what would, ultimately, be an awesome design magazine-style blog.

We went back and forth a bit on the design, and ultimately settled on a fairly clean, grid-based design that used an easily readable post layout with a cascading array of posts that would display in different formats on different pages and in different parts of the page.  Common to many of the sites we looked at, was a large, featured post area, for which we used the fantastic Dynamic Content Gallery by Studiograsshopper.  The posts on the home page display large with an excerpt, and then small at the bottom of the page with only the post title.  The right sidebar then displays the next several posts, so, just by looking at the front page of the site, you can easily navigate to the 8 most recent posts in addition to those featured in the Dynamic Content Gallery.  We used a similar layout for category and post archive pages, allowing the content to entice the reader to click into the post by giving them a thumbnail and an excerpt.

The design also gave them an opportunity to sell ad space on the home page and in the sidebar, and we made it so that they could also easily update the background image  whenever they wanted.

Single posts and pages use a different, but similar, sidebar layout, displaying the most recent posts, but abandoning the thumbnail, giving the site a more dynamic feel.  We also designed custom buttons for various social networks to allow their visitors to engage with them off the site as well.  The result is a bold and striking design that compliments their brash style.  Honestly, we can’t wait to see more from these guys and look forward to watching the site grow.

www.dirtycreative.com

WordPress plugins and scripts used: Dynamic Content Gallery, TimThumb

Polkadot Prince theme and free Blogger background uses real textures and photos scrapped together to create a handsome backdrop for your sweet little man. You’ll treasure showing off your little guy’s greatest moments with this theme and he’ll adore the robot, paper airplanes and toy cars decorating his space. We know, because our little guy checked it over for quality assurance!

If you like this and have a little girl who needs her blog dressed up, look for our Polkadot Princess template.

Buy Polkadot Prince — $5
Buy Polkadot Prince together with Polkadot Princess — $8