I’ve always said, I can design, but I’m no artist. So when it comes to illustration work of a certain caliber I call in Scott Jackson. Scott is a is a great artist – I first heard of him because of this excellent tutorial over at VectorTuts and promptly hired him to design the WPFixer Project mascot which I also ended up using as my own personal mascot on this site.

My WPFixer/mkjones mascot

WonderThemes Mascot Concepts

The process started a few months ago when Scott came up with some paper-based concepts based on my initial spec:

Initial mascot drawings from June 1st 2010

Right away I loved the concepts and rushed Scott to moved onto the colour/shading phase. I really didn’t throw in any extra guidance at this point as I trusted Scott’s judgment. In fact, the only colour theme I could come up with was “opposite of Superman please”.

After a week or so the full colour versions were ready:

Updated digital mascot from June 9st 2010

These versions we great. I loved the hard edge of the outline and the colours worked well. Rather than rushing into sending feedback I sat on these for a couple of weeks before requesting any changes.

Creative feedback

So, after 2 weeks of showing the mascot around, printing it out, inserting it into web mock-ups and general just sitting and looking at the image I decided on some final updates.

The first note was the facial expressions – the character just looked too happy for my liking. In my mind he was supposed to be saving the world from bad theme design, a thankless task by anyone’s measure, so I requested we loose the happy-go-lucky smiles and wide eyes and go for a look that was just a little more intense, like he meant business. I also wanted the eyes to have outlines to give them more definition.

By now I’d also discovered the colours were too a little too dark so I requested that the solid black outlines be replaced by a lighter grey and the whole thing ‘washed out’ a little bit to give it a cooler feel.

Basically, that was it – I was lucky because the initial concept was SO good I didn’t really need to give any detailed feedback.

And here it is, the final version…

Final 'WonderThemes' mascot - July 12th 2010

So, there you have it. From paper sketches to beautiful illustrations in 6 weeks and after only 3 drafts – the WonderThemes mascot was born.

His name? I’ve yet to come up with anything yet. Let me know if you can come up with anything

Of the many projects I have tried to get off the ground in the last 12 months Cover Art Review was one I was quite excited about.

The idea of the site was simple. I would open up a submittable form where users could come along, upload pretty album covers and then spend there days commenting and rating on the content to there hearts content.

Quick to market, quick to the grave

It didn’t take much work either. Built on WordPress (of course) with a modified free theme from the guys at WooThemes coupled with the TDO Mini Forms plugin meant I got things off the ground after about 2 days work (it also took about 3 hours to grab a few decent ‘starter’ album covers and upload them of course, but this could be considered testing).

Once finished I ‘launched’ the site with a few tweets and word of mouth to some of my friends.

I also hoped that Google would do most of the legwork and send users trying to find album covers (for downloaded music) as I had stuck to all the recommended SEO tips for each item.

I hoped that building a small community would be easy, I thought.

The site would pretty much manage itself! I thought.

I could earn money from affiliate sales on iTunes and Amazon! I thought….

Hope is not a marketing tool

I was wrong, oh how embarrassing. Since its launch in June Cover Art Review has faltered.

In fact, it was pretty much DOA. There hasn’t been a single upload from a site visitor in months. The Google Analytics are frankly too embarrassing to bring up and the only comments are from a couple of friends who I asked to test the site for me!

The lesson here is simple. Community sites such as Digg, Reddit and smaller neich varients like Share A Logo! and DesignBump require a lot of care and attention. You can’t simply wash your hands of them once the coding is done and hope people will take up the responsibility of making the site work, you need to make sure they come back for more.

I treated Cover Art Review like it was a client project. I did the work then walked away only to come back months later and see I’d wasted my time.

And so..

Its not all bad. I still feel the site has merit and should be updated and re-marketed at some point. I’m just too busy to take it on right now.

And after a 2nd look at the market I doubt this site will ever reach the visitorship levels I hoped for, I just need to scale back my ambition before wasting more time on this.

Besides the site costs me nothing to run so I won’t be taking it down any time soon.

If anyone would like to know more or get invovled in the Cover Art Review site feel free to leave a comment…

After what was about 2 months work re-designing the site and re-working my freelance business services I can finally say with gusto and pride that the ALL NEW base6 Design website has launched:

www.base6design.com

Check it out, if you like what you see why not Get A Quote - also, check out the introductory blog post.

eeek!

Those of you with fast minds may notice that the new site has a blog section. What does this mean for THIS site? Well, sadly, I imagine quite a lot. The mkjones blog will remain, but its direction will move away from design, WordPress and certain Tech subjects and to more personal interest topics.

Fear not, the base6 blog will fill in any gaps. You can subscribe to the RSS here.

I’ve just put the final touches to the new version of my long standing music website Baconmusic.

The site has undergone an total overhaul with the front and back-end both changing significantly.

After 2 years I finally managed to find a pretty seamless way of dumping Drupal in favour of a WordPress solution (of course). I hope to write more on this later as it was without a doubt the most challenging part of the project.

Using someone else’s theme

In order to achieve a fast turn around the site was themed using the quite wonderful Guzel Magazine Theme created by Ahmed Fouad over at www.customthemedesign.com.

I did a LOT of work transforming the original theme into a custom design. You can see the original theme has a very basic design and colour scheme:

I’ve kept the overall layout and structure of the original theme but the images and textures are totally different.

What I like most about this theme is the automatic thumbnail feature and the dynamic homepage. These features should make it simple for my users to add stories to the site without having to worry about how they will be listed on the site homepage. Something that was a huge worry with the old site.

This was my first experience in using a “pro” WP theme in a project and it was quite a pleasure to work with a solid, working base and only think about images and CSS.

Of course some mild hacks were required in order to get the theme doing exactly what I want (adding Google search for example) but overall its pretty much out-of-the box with my ‘sub-theme’ layered over the top.

Given time I hope to write about the Drupal/WP switch AND my experience customizing the Guzel theme. Keep a look out!

(FYI: The site is totally non-IE6 compatible. I’m working on a script which will warn users. Its about time web developers took a stand. NO-ONE should be using a 5 year old web browser.)