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

Around 4 weeks ago I began to look into re-branding base6 design after deciding that I had fallen out of love with the current logo, typeface, colour scheme and pretty much everything on the website other than the work in the portfolio.

Truth is, I’ve stuck with the current base6 logo (above) for longer than I should have and the only reason I stuck with it for almost 2 years is because I have over 3000 business cards that use the current design (lesson learned).

I also had some old niggling memory from my college design class where the tutor proclaimed that you should “never change your logo or typeface!11!!1!!” – although this may be a good rule to follow it has been broken by a LOT of large companies and organisations with mainly positive results.

Killing the rocket

The base6 design rocket icon was the first thing I ‘made’ for the business. It even came before the actual name of the business had been officially decided. If you didn’t notice the resemblance I used the ‘Planet Express Ship‘ for inspiration:

My initial idea for the rocket was to build upon its image and add space-stations, moon bases, astronauts and robots to the ‘base6′ universe! As cool as this sounds (and it does) its a dumb idea and frankly I don’t have the artistic kudos to achieve the complex illustrations needed to do it properly so for this reason, its out.

The dumb revelation that helped get me reboot

While sketching out the words ‘base6‘ on a couple of post-its during some downtime something dawned on me – the lower-case letter ‘b’ and the number ’6′ look sort of similar – obvious yes? Well, no – I’d been using the ‘base6′ moniker for almost 2 years and never noticed this resemblance.

It was this simple revelation that inspired me to take action and after firing up Photoshop I’d converted my scribblings to something new that I instantly liked:

The process in the image above moves from bottom to top and you can clearly see the 6/b synergy in each of the mock ups and how the design evolved over time.

Eventually I decided on something like this:

The new logo is on top, the old at the bottom. The colours are not final but with a little more tweaking (when I get the time) I think I’m getting somewhere.

Of course, the logo is just the first step. I need to re-work the website and get some new printed materials for physical use. All of this will take a couple of weeks, maybe months to find the time to work on. But the base6 re-boot has started and nothing can stop it now.

Please let me know what you think in the comments or by dropping me a tweet or email.

Hi all and thanks for everyone who attended this years WordCamp UK in Manchester. BIG thanks have to go out to Tony Scott for whipping everyone into shape and getting the event organised and the wonderful Chi-chi Ekweozor who worked tirelessly during the event to ensure things ran as smoothly as they possibly could.

What did I do?

This year I was called up to do 2 presentations. The opening keynote ‘How WordPress Themes Changed the World’ (link) and a presentation on the 2nd day about cool and interesting plugins I named ‘WOW Plugins‘.

Both presentations are online in raw format but I’ve had word from the video gurus over at Orange Coconut that full A/V versions will be available on WordPressTV and YouTube within the next 2 weeks.

Intentions for this years event

Although I had nothing set in stone I did lay out a few of achievements for this years event. They were, in no particular order:

1. To help educate my audience on WordPress themes and theme marketplaces.
2. Develop a face-to-face relationship with Jonny Allbut and Pete Innes after working with them remotely for the past 4 months.
3. Announce the launch of the Wonderflux/WonderThemes project.
4. To meet with new friends, lovers and potential collaborators from the WP-o-sphere.
5. Learn more about the BuddyPress platform.

Out of the 5 listed here. I pretty much nailed them all. The only one which I kept low-key was the WonderThemes marketplace project which I kept to just 1/2 a slide during my themes presentation. This was done intentionally as the project is still in the early phase with the Wonderflux theme framework only just being released as an invite-only BETA.

For more Wondeflux details check out http://wonderflux.com and @wonderflux on twitter. The first BETA should be out in the next 24 hours

Regarding number 5 I feel I must send out a special mention to Paul Gibbs who’s excellent sessions on BuddyPress really set the room alight (almost literally at one point, it must have been about 200 degrees in that room). I left the weekend with a real passion to learn more about the BuddyPress platform and a better understanding of just how far it has come over the past 12 months.

What did I see?

Jane & Peter

I really enjoyed the Jane and Peter show at the end of the first day. I have huge respect for what Jane did to the WordPress dashboard after v2.5 and find the whole area of usability quite fascinating. Peter Westwood needs no introduction to anyone who knows anything about WordPress, he really is a code genius.

Dave Coveney did a couple of  great talks on WordPress in Big Media and a follow up to his WordPress in the Enterprise from last years event. These are both very telling as they each show WordPress out of its core comfort-zone and how it can easily become a powerhouse-publishing platform.

Most of the other sessions I attended were technical-led as I really wanted to make the effort to learn some new techniques this year. This led me first of all to Jeffry Ghazally and his excellent ‘Extending WP e-Commerce’ session which was then followed up by lots of BuddyPress love from Paul Gibbs.

My Presentations & Feedback

I was first up Saturday with ‘How WordPress Themes Changed the World’ – which is a bit of a sexed-up title. The actual content of the talk was more of a themes-evolution history lesson and a look at how the commercial market has grown over the past couple of years.

I used a few popular theme vendors as examples and tried to explain how people have started to make a living from themes by either developing and selling products on their own sites or using existing marketplaces.

Me during my 'themes' keynote (via http://yfrog.com/3znwmfj)

I also threw in some theme-love based on my own experience with WordPress themeing and why I fell in love with it.

The more technical side of modern WordPress themeing was covered in ‘WordPress Template Design & Theme Frameworks’ by Jonny Allbut who was up right after me in the main room.

By day 2 I had been drafted in to do another presentation ‘WOW Plugins’ . Thankfully plugins are a popular area of WordPress and I was comfortable enough not putting together any slides for this, I just went commando and picked out around 20 cool and interesting plugins that I’ve used over the years – you can find the full list here.

This session was more of a 2-way exchange with plenty of audience participation – in fact, I ran over by almost 20 minutes because of all the questions/conversations that were thrown into the mix.

General feedback was good for both talks. With a lot of newcomers appreciating my ‘themes’ talk and good mixture of noobs/gurus commenting on the ‘plugins’ one.

Overall I was very pleased with how both of my talks went. I was particularly proud of how my ‘themes’ talk was accepted as it had been worked on and sculpted down to exactly what I wanted it to be – an easy to digest opener that I hoped everyone could enjoy and relate to. Over the weekend I received thanks and personal praise for the ‘themes’ talk and was left embarrassingly proud by some of the comments put my way at the Saturday social event. Thanks to everyone for their kind words on this one, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

The ‘UK’ Controversy

By the end of the Sunday everyone in the main room were pretty wasted and running on adrenaline and caffeine. This wasn’t the best time to begin a controversial subject of forcing the a re-name of ‘WordCampUK’ to a city-based naming convention. This topic led to what can only be described as a vicious backlash directed towards Jane who had brought the matter to the groups attention.

Although I’m just scratching the surface here I tried my best to remain diplomatic as I personally believe that UK-based-WordCampers have missed a bit of a trick by not splitting these events down into specific country-based gatherings in the first place.

For example last year in Cardiff could have quite easily been ‘WordCampWales‘ with this year being ‘WordCampEng‘. In fact, Jane herself did comment that someone in Edinburgh had been in touch with her directly giving us a ‘WordCampScot‘ right there.

Of course, its not quite that simple and Dave Coveney has laid out a very convincing counter argument with some valid points but everyone at this years event needs to have an eye to the future and the growth of this nascent community otherwise we will end up with a 1000 people at one event which isn’t really the WordCamp way.

The only other thing I want to say on this matter is that I would LOVE to see more than 1 WordCamp in the UK every year. Currently I don’t see a large enough community to support this but over time we would be foolish to ignore the growing demand for this.

Ideas for the next one…

Education seems to be the key for the next UK-based-WordCamp. We had a good mix of WP-newbies (I lost count on how many times I was asked ‘how do you make a theme…’) and WP-gurus so splitting the tracks down into ‘technical’ and ‘beginner’ rooms would be a logical step.

I’d also like more speakers to come forward, please, don’t be shy. I will of course be handing in my ideas to speak next year but I feel as if we need some fresh blood – so if you have the gumption to join us then get over to the Wiki and fire off some ideas.

That’s all for now, peace out – see you all soon and some of you sooner

Presentation now available now on Slideshare – video coming soon from the excellent guys at Orange Coconut.

Quick disclaimer: Some slides should be taken with a pinch of salt (the video will explain more) but please enjoy