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.

My latest blog design created in October 2008 for my blog nanyate?! The illustrations were inspired by the gates to Japanese temples called Torii. It’s one of the fastest designs I’ve ever made. I took less than an hour for the illustrations, and less than a day to code the site. I doesn’t quite showcase my skills but it’s something that isn’t too shabby given my time constraints.

It works on all modern browsers. I’m currently developing a mobile version for this design.

This is my blog’s design from April to September. It hasn’t achieved much in terms of recognition but it is one of the design that I am most proud of. It is the first time I had incorporate transparent PNGs to my designs thus completely eradicating a graphic header. The illustration of the flower was drawn on Photoshop using the vector pen tool.

One drawback with this design is Internet Explorer 6′s inability to read PNGs. PNG support is only available for the most modern browsers, and as such, this site isn’t as compatible as its predecessors.

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.