Drawing inspiration from the 1931 Supermarine S6B Seaplane (that was penned by the same man behind the design of the Spitfire), retro-aeronautical design cues and details have been fused into the interior and exterior of the car.

The outside remains rather unchanged from the standard Phatom, aside from the Avation Grey finish that is contrasted by the unpainted aluminum look of the matte silver hood.

The interior is were the design really hits home. The polished-mahogany surfacing with brushed aluminum details is simply breathtaking. Also, notice the anodized aluminum transmission tunnel with exposed torx fixings and swage lines that echo the oil cooling veins on the S6B fuselage.

This high level of detail is carried over to the car’s blood red needle tip, metal bezel retro-aeronautical instruments. With a limited production run of only 35 units, expect this special Phantom to cost as much as entire plane itself.

Full credit goes to Julian Hasen.

Despite having quite a large user base, BuddyPress is still rather new to the scene, having launched back in May 2009. And, as any developer would know, new software almost always contains bugs.

The integration process of BuddyPress into my responsive WordPress theme, Trisense, was reasonably seamless, however I did come across one seriously hair-pulling issue.

After installing the BuddyPress plugin and running through all the installation steps, you are prompted to either change your site’s current WP theme to the BuddyPress default theme, or to install a plugin called “BuddyPress Template Pack” which will help you to set up your current WP theme for BuddyPress.

Everything was fine up until step three of the BuddyPress Template Pack plugin.  First off, I must say that this section is very poorly worded and confusing, which has led to quite a number of people ranting on about it in the WordPress forums.

A few notes about this section:

•  You will need to access your theme’s root directory via FTP in order to edit the BuddyPress php files. If you don’t see the automatically installed BuddyPress folders in your theme’s root directory, make sure that you refresh your FTP browser window and they should appear.

• If you have not defined  #container, #content and #sidebar in your theme’s CSS, then it might be easier to define these elements and style them accordingly rather than overwriting these classes in all 16 files that you may need to edit.

•  I needed to replace these divs with my theme’s responsive enabled divs, which is where the headaches began…

Even after modifying all 16 files with my theme’s responsive divs, none of the BuddyPress pages would display properly. It turns out that I was just viewing the wrong pages. For example, to view the index.php file inside the activity folder, you will need to enter www.yourdomain.com/activity [NOTE: if you defined a custom link structure during the BuddyPress setup, then you will need to navigate to the link that you defined.

What confused me was that I though that accessing the activity link from the BuddyPress toolbar would bring up the activity/index.php file, however this was not the case.

If you still are having problems with your BuddyPress pages not displaying correctly, then first make all  the necessary mods to the 16 pages, and then click finish on the BuddyPress Template Pack step three page. The next page contains links to preview your BuddyPress pages. Click on any of them and hopefully your pages will render correctly. I think is issue might be a caching issue with the BuddyPress Template Pack plugin, but I'm not 100% sure.

Anyway I hope this helps to clear up some issues that I know quite a few people are having with this plugin. Enjoy using BuddyPress!

P.S After an afternoon's worth of keyboard thumping, and a lot of Googling, I'm pretty sure that I'm only the third [EDIT: make that fourth] person in the world who has integrated BuddyPress into a fully responsive WordPress theme. [Example 1, Example 2] However I may be completely wrong, so if you know of any examples of responsive BuddyPress-integrated WordPress themes then please leave a comment below.

In my opinion, the biggest aspect that Melbourne has over the other East Coast Australian capitals is just how accommodating the city is to pedestrian traffic.  The street footpaths are super wide which, unlike Sydney and Brisbane, saves you from having to sidestep every second chump that walks by so you don’t end up accidentally body slamming them.

Playing host to the the world’s largest tram network helps to slice n’ dice up wide roads into smaller, more pedestrian friendly proportions. Much to my surprise the public transport system actually works, which is a shock to see for someone who lives on the Sunshine Coast. I probably caught around a dozen or so trams from this very station in St. Kilda, and all I had to do was wait around 10 mintues max for a tram to come along and take me to where I wanted to go. Even if you missed your stop, which I did a few times, there would be another stop no more than 500 meters down the road. Certainly convenient for people who rely on public transport, but I can see how all these stops and tram lines could piss off motorists. I personally wouldn’t own a car if I lived in Melbourne.

To what yobbos are to Brisbane hipsters are to Melbourne.  Mostly found congregating around small hole-in-the-wall cafes and other areas of not too mainstream interest, I found hipsters in pretty much every area that I visted. I think there is some kind of unwritten law that all cafes in Melbourne must abide in order to operate:

1. Alt/prog rock  music must be played at all times.
2. Customers must have the option to sip their (ususaly organic) cappuccinos on bean bags or up-turned milk crates.
3. Jenga blocks must be present, if not, then a scrabble board will suffice.
4. Bonus points will be awarded for having the following items on display: vinyl records (definitely nothing mainstream), CRT televisions (the ones with wooden sides and antennas sticking out of the top),  retro pinball machines, racks of used clothing items and photographs that have the whole retro-vintage-grunge-fantasy-instagram-vibe going on (reference above).

One place where I didn’t find any hipsters congregating was at Albert Park, thanks to the large presence of atmospheric polluting polar bear killing race cars and mainstream music.

Nothing in the world beats the sound of a Formula One car at full throttle flying past at 300km/h+. As eargasmic as the sound may be, it is earshatteringly loud though. If you ever find yourself at a circuit during an F1 weekend then make sure that you have a set of earplugs handy.  And try not to rock up to the circuit with a hangover.

I, along with the whole crowd was delighted to see Mark Webber and rookie Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo finish in the points. A fantastic drive from both of them.

Here’s the remnants of Pastor Maldonado nasty shunt on the last half of the final lap. It was a crying shame to see him DNF from what would have been a career best result, but it did leave the crowd on the edge of their seats right up until the checkered flag. I couldn’t of asked for a better race. Hats off to Kamui Kobayashi for avoiding the same fate on the final corner, which happened right in front of my grandstand!

The Ability To Innovate

Web design & development is a service. No matter what way you look at it, you are providing a client with a service so they can realise their own solution. My web design teacher once told me that you will always be a slave to design, and he’s right. All that most clients want is something that looks good and is functional, and it’s your job to provide them with that.

Now this grinds me for one particular reason- this mindset kills innovation. More often than not, most clients prefer to have a nice, safe, cookie-cutter out of the box website with their branding and content in it. There are very few clients who are wanting for a truly innovative website with never-seen before technology and a ground-breaking unique design, and these are kinds of websites that I personally want to be producing.

Why? Because designing and developing cookie-cutter after cookie-cutter corporate websites is like a production line worker standing in front of a conveyor belt with a hammer in hand. It’s unchallenging and boring. You learn next to nothing new and you’re achieving next to nothing in the big picture as you are not pushing the limits of what can be accomplished by challenging known boundaries of web design and development. You could only take on projects that require something truly innovative, but then by doing so you would be cutting out 90% of your clientele. It’s not economical and it’s not practical.

Absolute Control

As you are a slave to design, you are also a slave to your client’s business idea, concept and message. In my time, I’ve come across clients whose businesses excel in this area, and others that are completely moronic. As you are providing a service for clients to communicate their business idea, concept and message across the digital medium, you do not have a right to say what these areas should be of and how they should be communicated. When I am working on a website for a business that I feel has been set up to fail, I work through the entire process with a sour taste in my mouth. This restrains me from having passion, belief and a strong connection with the project, which are three necessities that I need to have in order to produce truly great work.

When you are creating your own product, you come up with your own idea, you produce your own concept and you embody your own message. You have complete control over these areas, which enables you to produce something that your genuinely care about and will do everything to ensure that it will succeed. When it comes to mistakes and failure, there is no buck passing. It all falls down to you. Some people feel uncomfortable being placed in situations like these, but I personally would not have it any other way.

Effort Versus Reward

You could produce a mediocre website that does the job or one of the greatest websites the world has ever seen, but in the end, you will be paid the same amount. Producing a great website that ends up being featured on awwwards.com will certainly grant you some inner-industry fame and your client’s praise, but ultimately the only tactile reward that you receive for all your hard work is more work…and more cookie-cutters.

Online product development is much more straightforward in this aspect. Produce a crappy product and it will not sell. Produce a brilliant, innovative product that solves a common problem and is marketed correctly, and you will be rewarded with high sales, a legion of loyal customers and a genuine feeling of self-fulfilment because you have created something that is directly benefiting  a great number of people around the world.

Geographically Unbound

In web design and development, your business and your clients are bound to your immediate geographical position. However, with the advent of virtual conferencing apps like Skype, the line between working on a local versus a global playing field is thinning. With most clients though, it is still an absolute necessity to be able to sit down face to face with a designer and/or developer, to put their cards on the table and to work out a solution in that fashion. The matter of the fact is that a large majority of people do not feel comfortable making critical business decisions on something as important as their own website through a webcam and a screen with someone half way across the world with someone who they have never met in the flesh.

In online product development, you are producing a digital product for the digital marketplace. It’s your product that will be providing the service, not you and your own two hands. As the product is entirely digital, it eliminates all of the painful logistics involved in selling a physical product as your customers only need an internet connection to access and purchase your product. You are still required to provide ‘hands on’ service to your customers via customer support, but this is mostly provided either by email or by a support forum, thus eliminating geographic dependency. However most importantly, your potential customer base has gone from the population of your local community to roughly 2 billion people who have access to the internet today.

Passive Income 

A good entrepreneurial friend of mine once said the two greatest words in the English dictionary are passive and income. When you are designing and/or developing a website, you need to be in front of a computer labouring away in Photoshop and Dreamweaver in order for you to earn your crust.

With product development, you could be passed out under a palm tree in Cancun and still be turning profit. Obviously, to ensure that your product continues to bring in the dollars for years to come, you will need to provide excellent customer support and continual updates to the original release, but there’s nothing stopping you from ducking off for a week or few in Paris for a bit of sightseeing and paying a knowledgeable friend to take care of customer support while your gone.

To conclude, I am not entirely giving up web design and development at all, in fact, I’ll be doing it more than ever. All that I have changed is my method of delivery from service to products. By doing so has created an inherently higher level of risk, but also an inherently higher level of reward. Although it’s still too early to tell, I feel that I will enjoy this line of work much more. And at the end of the day, genuinely enjoying what you are doing is all that matters.

Just a quick post on a very strange error that I came across while writing the “How To Make A Custom Twitter Profile Design That Works” post a few nights ago.

Everything was fine until about halfway through writing the post when I suddenly could not save as draft, could not preview and could not publish the post.

I tried every trick in the book to try and fix it: deleting the post, starting a new one and pasting the content in, deleting my browser and WordPress cache, restarting WordPress, disabling all my plugins and restarting my plugins folder, but nothing worked. I even tried pasting in the post into another WordPress powered site housed on a completely different server, and still no luck.

After hours trawling Google to no avail, I was on the verge of doing a complete WordPress reinstall, but then I decided for some reason to remove the hyperlinks from my post.

Much to my surprise and relief, it fixed the problem. After I saved as draft, I went back through my post, re-added the hyperlinks and it published fine. This may or may not have been resolved with the  3.3.1 release  a few days ago, but if you are in, or ever find yourself in a similar situation as I was, try delinking all your hyperlinks before pulling all of your hair out.

There has never been a better time to be a WordPress theme developer than now. Ever since I developed my first WordPress-powered site over six months ago, I’ve witnessed the WordPress marketplace explode in sales and user adoption.

During those six months, where my hands were tied up with uni and client projects, I saw the Envato Network, one of the world’s largest digitial stock marketplaces, reach an epic milestone of 1,000,000 users. 

Out of Envato’s nine online marketplaces, the biggest and highest grossing by far is Themeforest. Themeforest specialises in selling premium website templates, with its most profitable section being premium WordPress themes. To give an example of the kind of money that can be made selling premium themes, Themeforest’s highest selling author recently clocked over to $1,000,000 worth in sales last month.

Another example of the gold mine that is premium WordPress themes is the sales record of
U-Design. I remember being flabbergasted when this theme brought in $41,000 during its first month on the marketplace, and now, exactly seven months down the track, the theme has single-handedly generated over $270,000 worth in sales!

Well, the time of sitting back and watching other WordPress devs strike gold is over. I have been strategizing, re-strategizing and researching like a machine over the past few months, and I feel like I have come up with a concept that will do quite well on the ThemeForest marketplace. I’m going to stay tight-lipped about the project’s finer details for now, but you will undoubtedly hear about it on and off during the course of this month or so.

All I know is that during this month, I will be consuming record amounts of Red Bull, minimal amounts of sleep, monstrous vents of frustration while maintaining zero levels of patients. However, I know the result will be worth it.

As Richard Branson said, ”You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” Thankfully, my house is carpeted.

This would have to take the cake as my favourite photo of the trip. It was well past midnight when I went to set my tripod up on a traffic island in the middle of Times Square. A couple of minutes later I was gently tapped on the back by some stranger. I turned around to find lady and her partner who had seen me earlier that day at the conference. We chatted for at least half and hour about the conference, life and stereotypical American misconceptions about Australia, which I found hilarious. After we had said our goodbyes, I turned around to randomly find a horse and carriage right in front of me- and the result is what you see above.

A definite must-do while visiting Manhattan is a ferry ride to The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The Downtown Manhattan skyline is an image of beauty that you have to witness in the flesh to truly appreciate.

Every tourist’s must-have Statue of Liberty shot.

A good example of Canon’s F1.8 50mm prime lens auto-focus in play. It really does make taking cool depth of field burred foreground/sharp background or burred background/sharp foreground photographs an absolute breeze.

Another place on the top of my must-visit list was the Apple Store on 5th Avenue. The store is open 24 hours, seven days a week and is constantly packed. In fact, I’m quite sure it is the most frequented store in New York.

The glass staircase and hydraulic piston lift are absolute masterpieces of design that the late Steve Jobs had a hand in creating.  Jobs even patented the design once it was completed he liked it so much. How on earth do I know this? Well, I was very fortunate to receive a signed copy of Steve Jobs by Walther Isaacson after Walther presented a keynote presentation on Steve Job’s life at ad:tech. The book goes into detail about the creation process of the Apple Stores, and it is honestly the most enjoyable book that I have read to date.

Another must see when visiting Manhattan is the Rockefeller Center. The whole complex is lavished with epic statues of Ancient Greek Gods and Titans. This statue of Prometheus is located in front of the center’s ice skating rink which is surrounded by a massive restaurant. Drop the kids off at the rink and go for a coffee & cake inside. Love it.

After skating your way into the night, you must to head up the top of the main building to the Top of the Rock observation deck. As soon as you step out onto the balcony, you are greeted with a grand view of the Empire State Building sitting smack bang in front of you.

[Click for hi-res]

It’s regarded as the best view of New York, and although I didn’t go up the Empire State Building, when you are met with vistas like this then you can’t help but agree. I smuggled my tripod to the top [they only let pro photographers with a licence and permission to shoot from the observation deck with a tripod] and the guards were giving me hostile looks the whole way up, but I managed to get away with it.

A few blocks north of the Rockefeller Center is St Peter’s Cathedral. This building was so architecturally gorgeous; I even considered turning Catholic just so I could attend the daily masses! Free entry as well, but try to stay out of the way of people who actually go there to pray.

New York cusine is world famous and for a reason. Everywhere I ate, from your typical family restaurant franchise to your hole-in-the-wall Irish pub served consistently top quality dishes for affordable prices. That aspect coupled with service that is on a completely different level than it is here in Australia, I really didn’t feel bad at all leaving a couple of dollars on the table as a tip.

Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street. The name “Wall Street” is actually derived from a large wall that was erected in the early 15^th century to keep marauding American Indians away from the colonists.

Security was extremely tight at the NYSE mainly because of the…

…Occupy Wall Street camp a few blocks down at Zuccotti Park. I was glad that I got to see the camp at its peak before the New York Council passed a law that banned civilians from squatting on privately owned land a week after I left.

I love irony in advertisement, so I had to take a snap of this Wikileaks van driving around the Occupy Wall Street Camp.

Probably the biggest highlight for me during my visit was the Museum of Modern Art. I am, admittedly, a fan of fine art, and the MoMA had plenty of the latter. Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory has long been my favourite painting, so I was overjoyed when I saw it in real life. What struck me the most was just how small the painting was. You really had to get up close to it in order to appreciate it which was undoubtedly Dali’s intention when creating this piece.

Last year I wrote a research report on Pablo Picasso for art history. I never would have thought that in less than a year I would be standing face to face with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Jackson Pollock’s massive 2.7×5.3 metre One: Number 31 painting was drawing equally massive crowds, making it quite difficult to get a decent photo of it.

One of most valuable paintings in the world, Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night was casually sitting on a wall amongst a bunch of Picassos. The fact that there was no velvet rope or bulletproof glass obstructing the paintings is to me is the best aspect of the MoMA. You can get up close and personal with paintings that would be worth in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars without anything getting in your way, allowing you to truly appreciate the artwork.

Another great thing about the MoMA is the sheer variety of works in the building. For example, there is an entire floor devoted to the architecture of New York and built environment design that contained this interesting would-be model of a floating city built on the Hudson River.

Typophiles would be in absolute heaven at the MoMA, with an entire section of the museum devoted to typography.

I was particularly amazed at the amount of work that went into the Gotham typeface. Gotham designer Tobias Frere-Jones spent over a year walking block-by-block in Manhattan taking photographs of old signs and lettering found on old buildings as inspiration before he even sat down and started pencilling out the typeface. Now that’s dedication to the job.

To round off this post, I thought it would be cool to post a photo of this plaque that I found in the MoMA describing the origins of the famous and the imitated ad nauseam I ♥ NY logo.

The logo as famous as the city itself, and for a good reason. No matter what walk of life or how peculiar your tastes and interests are, there is always something to please you in New York. I have yet to travel to a place that has left such a strong impression on me since leaving. I would definitely go back in a heart beat.

Design Limitations

Probably the biggest reason why people stick to the default twitter design is because you can only customise your profile’s background, link and text colours.  I actually support this move. One only has to think back to the days of MySpace where you were annoyed to death with heinous auto-play music with no stop or mute buttons, super small impossible to read fonts and whole paragraphs written in strikethrough. 

Don’t even remind me

The biggest limitation that you have to pay attention to when designing your twitter profile’s background is the way your profile will be displayed across different screens. Your twitter stream and side bar will always float in the centre of the page regardless of the screen it is being viewed on.

Twitter viewed on a 1920×180 HD Screen

Twitter when viewed on a 1024×768 iPad 2 screen

As you can see, a HD desktop screen will give you plenty of room to play around and design a really nice background. However, on an iPad2 screen, your twitter stream and side bar almost takes up the entire viewing area, leaving your background covered up. If you are designing a twitter profile for a business, make sure that you place all important information such as URL’s, descriptions and contact info in the profile’s description and not in your twitter profile’s background. It’s common sense really, but it’s surprising how often this mistake is committed.

The red area represents the “safe” area to design in

At the end of 2011, a common and fairly safe screen resolution to base your designs off is 1440×900. Usually I would swear by the 1024×768, 960gs method, but in this case I am going to work with a larger screen so that the design can be more flexible.

Defining the design direction

If you are designing a twitter profile for a company, then it is important to follow the same design language, colour pallet and link styles as the company’s existing website or branding. Adhering to brand consistency across social media is something that few companies grasp for reasons that do not make sense to me. Social media IS media today, so it is important to maintain a brand’s image across all platforms on the web- it’s the essence to maintaining a strong brand.

Here are a few good examples:
Envato
Coca-Cola

If you are designing your twitter profile for purely personal use, then feel free to do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t end up looking like that Myspace profile from above.

Personally, I am obsessed with white space, minimal colour pallets, symmetry, subtle design cues and the lack of visual clutter hence the look of my twitter profile and blog. I will outline the steps involved in creating my twitter profile design below.

Creating the background

Open up Photoshop and create new 1920×1200 solid white document. Aside from you ballin’ Apple Cinema Display owners, 1920x1200px screens are the largest common displays today. As we want our twitter profiles to look good on as many different screen sizes as possible, our design’s maximum limitations will be 1920×1200, but optimised for a 1440×900 screen.

99% of the time I have “Snap to guides” checked in Photoshop. It makes dragging out marquees and creating shapes so much easier.

Before whipping out the paint bucket, brush and gradient tools, I always set up some general guides first. As the design will be optimised for a 1440x900px viewing area, we will have an approximately 250x800px column to create our design in, so I have set up two guidelines to show this. I have also added in two horizontal guides 20px and 40px from the top of the document that represents the top edge of the twitter stream and the top edge of your display picture.

It’s all about the gradient

Next, I created a new layer and dragged down three more horizontal guides at 1px, 5px and 6px from the top of the document. With the new layer selected, I then filled the top 1px line with a medium grey, the middle area with a maroon to pure red gradient and the bottom 1px line with light grey. You can barely notice these colours at 100% view, but I did say that I am obsessed with subtle design-cues

Next I will create another subtle design-cue, a 45 degree line pattern for the background. Open up a 12x12px Photoshop document and fill the background with black. Create a new layer above the background, and with a 1px pencil, draw in three medium grey lines. Delete the black background, then select “Edit > Define Pattern”

Subtleness is key when dealing with background patterns

Reopen the original document, create a new layer between the red line and the white background, then select “Layer > New Fill Layer > Pattern” and fill this layer with the line pattern. Zoom out to 100% and use the layer’s opacity controls to reduce the strength of the line pattern so that it is barely visible.

Designing The Monogram

About now the super-minimalist hipster designers would call it a day, but I’ve decided to go a bit further and add a touch of personal branding. The text monogram was created using my own version of the Eurostile Extended font that I customised in Fontographer.

EDIT: I was planning on only using the monogram for my twitter profile, but I ended up quite liking it so I’ve decided to use it on my blog.

Reversing the background pattern and applying it to another element on the page is a good way to make it stand out more

First, a dark-grey to almost-black gradient was applied at 135 degrees. Second, the steps to create a line pattern were repeated, however this time the lines were drawn in the opposite direction and in pure white. The reversed line pattern was then applied to the monogram by shift-clicking the type layer and selecting” Layer > New Fill Layer > Pattern”.  Drop the pattern layer’s opacity until the lines are barely visible.

Always treat drop shadows with caution. Heavy drop shadows can make a good design look shit

To finish off the monogram, a very gentle drop-shadow was applied to help lift the logo off the background. I added my blog’s URL in Eurostile Extended Bold beneath the monogram. A very light emboss effect was added to give the impression that the URL has been pressed into the background.

Never forget to optimise your images before uploading

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the design was optimised for the web. The last thing you want is your twitter profile taking eons to load because of an non-optimised background.

Here are a few handy tips for image optimisation:

• If there is no obvious quality reduction, save images at around 65% quality.
• Try dropping the quality down to 35%. If there is no obvious quality loss then save it. However, most of the time I save my images at 65% quality.
• If the image is small to medium in size – select the optimised check box. If the image is large, select the progressive check box. This will result in your image loading in layers, which is much more attractive then  watching an image load from top to bottom.
• Set the Metadata drop-down to none. This will knock off a few kb’s
• If you are optimising photographs that have a lot of different colours, bump up the blur count to 0.1 or 0.2. This will smooth out some of the pixilation and hazing effects that appear when you drop the image’s quality.

And there you have it. A twitter profile that reflects the branding and design language of my own blog while being compatible on a wide variety of screen sizes. If you enjoyed this tutorial then please follow me on twitter. I only set-up my personal account last week and so far I’ve only had cam girls follow me trying to flog their services, so some real people following me would be nice. Any further questions please feel free to leave a comment below.

I’ve got a faint idea on the design direction that I am going to theme the blog with, but i’ll be sticking with the out-of-the-box Twenty Eleven theme for now. My goal is to have the design done by the New Year, and the blog will undoubtedly evolve as I do. If you have any ideas or have seen some amazing WordPress blog/portfolio themes that you just have to share with me, the by all means leave a comment below.