Ivy Tan

This is the latest Wordpress theme for my personal blog. It’s based on a very different concept from my previous designs. The focus of this theme is typography rather than the color combination and the illustration. It’s also coded according to XHTML 1.0 Strict instead of Transitional. Some elements of CSS3 have also been used to cater for future browsers. As always, the design is always optimized from search engines.

This is the second Wordpress theme designed for my current blog. This layout was an experiment for creating a one-column layout. Like its predecessor, everything was scripted according to web standards and optimized for search engine listing. It was this layout that won my blog an award from my web hosting company.

This layout was also the first time I had designed a fancy footer to compensate for the lack of a sidebar.

I was playing around with unconventional ways of designing a web log and decided on a horizontal scroll, instead of the traditional vertical scroll. In terms of search engine listings and global accessibility, such a layout will fare very badly because bots and browsers aren’t able to surf the site well.

In terms of design, this site was quite a success! It was featured on various CSS galleries and popular design magazines; the most notable being Smashing Magazine and Design Meltdown.

The site was designed in 2006 in Adobe Photoshop. The HTML and CSS was hand-coded on Notepad. The site took around 20 hours to complete.

I designed four layouts for Leave the Pack Behind during my 1.5 years there.

#1: 2006 Layout

This is the first layout I created for LTPB. As I was still quite new to the organization and was unsure of their expectations, I designed a very basic layout putting usability first before aesthetics. Everything, except the logo was created by me. Coding was handcoded on Notepad.

#2: Contest Layout

Every year, Leave the Pack Behind holds a quit smoking contest. The theme we decided in 2006 was inspired by Survivor, the reality tv series, where the last quitter survives and wins $1000 from the organization. From that theme, I designed the logo, which is essentially a non-smoking logo jazzed up to look like the Survivor logo.

#3: Summer Layout

Since Leave the Pack Behind is a campus program, they do not operate during the summer. Nevertheless, the organization wanted to maintain the site so that potential smokers may continue to find information on the site.

#4: 2007 Layout

Using the organization’s official colors, I designed a new layout for 2007. This layout is the first time I’ve attempted to use AJAX and Javascript; I used the famed Accordion script for the site’s menu – all in hopes that a little animation would excite our visitors!