New Theme: Yukata Summer (Beta)
Nanyate?! has a new theme! This layout is titled “Yukata 浴衣 Summer”. For those who are unfamiliar with Japanese culture, yukata is the summer version of a kimono 着物. The flower in the background is inspired from a yukata featured in last year’s issue of JJ Magazine. Yes, I drew it. And yes, it took forever. I haven’t actually illustrated anything complicated for a while, so I was quite antsy when I drew the flower.
The layout is currently in beta mode. The background is incomplete. I wanted to add a couple more embellishments but I haven’t received my brushes from Seishido as of yet. And of course, there are bugs to kill and the layout doesn’t work on IE 6 at all. Most bugs will be fixed by tomorrow. IE6 compatibility will have to wait. Busting out my old Sony Vaio to re-code half the site is just…argh.
I’ve been at this for 2 days. 1 day for drawing the background. 1 day for designing + coding. I haven’t slept for 20 hours. So, pardon this rough post and rough layout.
I’m exhausted. Off to bed.
UPDATE!:I received my brushes! Here’s the new background! Most bugs for the Mac Firefox, Safari and Opera are squashed. I’d expect that their Windows would react the same way. Now all that’s left is that nasty IE6, which I don’t have access to – not even from my old Sony VAIO! IE NetEenderer isn’t powerful enough for me to refresh every 5 seconds, so coding for IE will have to wait until I go to my school’s library.
Sorry, IE6 users. On the other hand… you really shouldn’t be using IE6. Microsoft is already developing IE8 and even had a beta release! I can’t imagine what kinda security flaws you IE6 users have to deal with. 
The browser’s free for goodness’ sakes; all it takes to upgrade is some free time. Think about it this way: just 10 minutes less of porn, infinite increase in security. Time for a upgrade, people.
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OMG! Woman, this is GORGEOUS!
*gawks for the next 2 hours*
this is awesome!
maybe it will be better if you come here this summer to get the real feeling about how the summer is in tokyo
OMG! I love this! I love the colours so much! And flowers in full bloom always get me happy and motivated about spring even though those same flowers give me the worst type of allergies possible! Oh, but this is just so beautiful! Congratulations on coming back in full force from hiatus, Ivy! You’re amazing! *applauds*
ivy, this is so pretty!!
Wow. This is really, really nice. It somehow makes me thirsty… for grape juice. Or “bandung”.
lovely, as always!
you’re so talented!
omg! omg! so pretty!!!!!
can’t imagine my delight when i saw this page loaded. <333333
you read jj too? heheh.
It is so beautiful, I love it
I also looked at it in IE6, and it looks like the content area is too wide for IE6, so some pixels need to be taken off for this browser…and maybe an absolute positioning of the navigation will get it in shape..anyway, thumbs up for the lovely illustrations 
I love your update!! The flower most definitely looks very well crafted, you’re a wonderful artist! I couldn’t find the kimono in the JJ cover that you were referring to.
I can’t wait to see it finished finished finished!
Oooh, pretty. (: Never realized that blue and pink could actually go together, but well, this looks good!
One little thing – the top right corner looks a little sparse. Was wondering how it’d look if the flower was shifted higher so that it fulls up the space.
Unrelated, but I love your tagline! Hahaha.
I don’t really like that space either but the background isn’t quite finished yet since I’m still waiting for brushes.
I’ve temporarily moved it up until I receive those darn brushes.
I used IE NetRenderer to check it out. It’s like you said. It’ll be difficult to code without live previewing of IE6. Come to think of it, even my old Vaio uses IE7. I’m going to have to borrow my housemate’s laptop. HAHAHA. Sigh. IE is a headache to code for since they don’t read margins the same way as all other browsers.
Hey Ivyy!!
I remember one time, our japanese math teacher took us on a field trip to the japanese cultural centre in toronto and the people there put us in kimonos for fun. I got to wear a yukata..and it looked just like your layout..blue w/ pink flowers! omg brings back memories haha.
I really like the smaller flowers (the one w/ white outlines). It really looks like the background is a piece of fabric!
.
This may be a dumb question but what program did you use to draw this? photoshop?
Yups! 100% Photoshop CS3. I would use illustrator but it seems easier to use with a tablet, which I don’t own. So, all my graphics use Photoshop. The small flowers are actually a stand-in brush for until I get the brushes I ordered, plus a few edits.
Wow this is beautiful. I love the color scheme. I would never think that these colors would go well together. You did a great job on it. =) I can see a lot of work has been put into it.
omg i love it! you did a wonderful job on the theme woman.
I like the previous one much better for some reason.
You always come up with the snidest comment. The previous one is nowhere as good as this one. LOL. I can vouch for it. So can the 15 people who commented before you.
I love this new theme! It looks amazing! You drew that?! Ah, jealous. I can’t draw to save my life.
I’d love to go to Tokyo in the summer!! LOL Actually, I might prefer spring because of the cherry blossoms!!
Sorry for being so impatient to leave a comment about the new theme in the previous post. I think I’m too elated to see a new Nanyate theme
Serious Ivy, you’re a great designer! You can play with the colours really well. I’ve neer thought that pink and blue come across as a wonderful mix.
Sorry to hear about the PNG transparency issue! It’s all IE6’s fault, and yea, cross-browser CSS styling is a big pain in the butt! Stupid IE.
I heard that there’s a two PNG transparency javascript fix available.
1. The simple one, but no longer updated since Mar 2008 – Supersleight Transparency PNG in IE
2. The rather complicated counterpart – PNG in Windows IE
I hope this helps, all the best!
Hahaha I’m trying to avoid using javascript right now. I generally do not use javascript to get over structural problems because it will have repercussions when javascript is turned off. I actually have an IE fix using pure CSS. But that’s not really my problem right now. It’ll be fixed once I implement it. The main problem right now is that the entire layout is out of ’shape’ because IE6 sees margins very differently from other browsers. The only way to fix of course is to have IE6. And it’s a hassle for me to use my old laptop since it’s so old and can’t even handle surfing a few sites.
But thanks for the scripts anyway.
Hahaha! Not really. My housemate bought a whole stash. I just borrowed it from her since I was bored…then I got inspired.
Wow this is absolutely astonishing! I love the details and the colour schemes! Amazing.
OHMYGOSH CUTE! The background is GORGEOUS and the color matches really well!
That’s why I never want to go to university to study history… I know I’ll get bored and doze off during classes. School and work sucks the fun out of everything no matter how much you were into it prior.
Love the new theme! I’m using Safari right now and it looks good!
I started designing a new theme for mine too except it will be such a pain to code because there are so many drop shadows, rounded corners and patterns. I wonder if I’ll ever finish?
Glad to know you’ve found a proper CSS fix for the transparency problem. Yea you have a point – everything will screw up if someone ever tries to turn off the javascript. I’m not sure whether are you referring to this CSS fix:
img {filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(...);
}
Oh and I see a new background! Looove the new brushes. And did I mention that I love the soft glow behind the flowers?
Yea IE6 reads and renders margins and paddings very differently from other browsers. Very irritating. For me usually I’ll use a conditional tag for IE6 (something like <!–[if IE]> and <![endif]–>) and insert a stylesheet to force IE6 to render the page the way I wanted it to be.
I use conditional tags for IE in every layout because that’s the most semantic way to code for IE. Usually it doesn’t require busting out my old laptop because the IE NetRenderer shows the problems with the layout. But it seems that a) the NetRenderer refuses to respond to AlphaImageLoader or b) none of the PNG hacks actually work.
BTW, the javascripts you sent me are just modified versions of the AlphaImageLoader, so that people don’t have to add the same line of code to everything they need translucent. CSS.
I’ll need a real IE6 to see what’s really going on. Sigh. I want to freaking kill the IE developers right now.
Where are all the naked women? Remind me why I’m coming here again…
I would blame IE6. Frankly speaking I find no compelling reason to turn yourself inside out and upside down just to make a theme look proper on that cranky Bill Gates’ browser. And Microsoft is crafty and cunning enough to make IE7 and more available for people who use genuine copies of Windows and so IE users who have counterfiet version will at most have IE6 on their computer. It’s just very disturbing.
Yea and I agree with you that IE6 is very outdated – I strongly recommend anyone who uses it to either upgrade their IE (although I don’t strongly encourage that because even Firefox 1.0 performs and interprets CSS better than IE7), or just switch to Firefox or Safari (I wouldn’t expect any Mac users to continue using IE, but just in case).
I do have IE6 on my home computer – I didn’t upgrade it to IE7 because I wanted to see whether my layouts break in IE6 or not. Do you need any help?
oh wow, gorgeous layout Ivy! You put so much effort into your work! each individual petal…
You layout looks really good. I love the original color combo. However, I think the background repetition is a bit unflattering to the eyes, maybe if you have a fixed background, it’ll look less busy and distracting. Overall I really love the creativity. =]
I experimented with the fixed background idea. It looks alright but it doesn’t show off the illustration, which is the main point of the background in this layout. Since this isn’t your typical layout where there is a header graphic, the layout’s graphics is 100% contingent on the aesthetics of the background, so by fixing it will render the aesthetics quite useless. Also, the background is made to be much longer than the screen to accommodate larger screen users. So, if I fix the background, those on the smaller screen like 800×600 or 1024×738 will not able to see the full extent of the graphic, making it quite ugly for them.
The background only distracts from the content when people madly try to scroll through the site. I don’t find it difficult to read or distracting when the site is slowly scrolled down to read line-by-line – which, of course, would be the main point of a blog. I’m currently looking for a paged comment plugin to prevent further scrolling. Maybe when that’s installed, you won’t find it distracting anymore.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
you really put a lot of work into your layout o_o and it turned out really well! I totally suck at making layouts with dark backgrounds, so mine usually have white as basic color ^^;
IE6 problem, hm? I usually just check if it works in IE7 and firefox…people should just use firefox, would be so much easier ~_~
Its beautiful! I absolutely love it. Great job
Tag! You’re it!
Halley’s got a point though. The “white hue” around the (awsome!) flower is very irritating for the eyes when scrolling…
Haha! “a stash” of JJ Magazines. Sounds like something illegal.
so preeeetty! you are craaazy!
Hey Ivy! I came across your new layout via the link on Teddy’s site. This is definitely one hell of a change- for the better!
Its obvious that you always put a lot of effort into the design and the coding of your layouts. You make me feel ashamed going to all that effort to code for IE6 users- I am so lazy, I would never have gone to that extent, it shows how dedicated you are to your site.
And thank you for the little notice about my layout, I have it fixed now, and hopefully there shouldn’t be anymore issues *fingers crossed*
Great theme and good job with the illustration, it came out really well! I’m loving the colors.
oh cool! Illustrator isn’t that hard w/out the tablet. Although, the mouse is just not the same I guess, more time consuming? (but then again, I’ve never used a tablet before so i would have no ideaa how that feels :p)
I don’t even use a mouse. -__-;; I use the macbook trackpad. LOL!!! It’s cause I like to right click on the mac and the mouse wouldn’t right click unless I press on ctrl. On the trackpad, I just click with two fingers and ta-da! Right click! LOL!
your themes very nice. but i didn’t see where i can download this themes.
~ LuxBeach
Sorry, they’re not meant for download. These are made for myself. I plan to make some for download in the near future.
Wow this is very nice layout
and thanks for the information about the kind of flower this is 
great job on your template. Good luck! 
Thanks!
Actually it’s not a flower. It’s a form of clothing. LOL!
And I thought it was a reference to female genitalia.. *sigh*