About the Re-Design

This theme is all about serenity, simplicity and balance. I’ve cut out a few redundant pages and removed some unnecessary design elements, so that it’s minimal enough for you to focus on the content but still design-arty enough for my site to retain some of its personality.

The nanyate lantern has always been quite special to me. It reflects my state of soul, in some ways. It spent the last year submerged in water, overwhelmed by waves and drifting along with no land in sight. Now it’s hovering on top of water. I think it represents that I’ve spiritually and psychologically grown in the last year — that I could hold my own and no longer be swept around by the whims of society and the world.

The theme’s also got an awesome new font. For years, I’ve been looking for a something that’s loud, artistic and peppered with a little Asian-styled humility. I’m so, so psyched to have finally found it in Estrya’s Handwriting.

Behind the Name: Flow

The new theme is called Flow. It’s named after a popular psychology book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The book talks about a state of mind where you are so immersed in what you do that you can experience beyond yourself and your surroundings. It’s an amazing feeling to experience, and it’s something I definitely feel when I design my blog. I’m so engrossed in the code that I often forget to sleep and eat….and it’s all strangely therapeutic and energizing despite the terrible eye bags I have now.

Feedback, please!

As usual, I’m too excited about my theme to properly test before I launch, so it’s still in beta mode. I’ll be testing for browser compatibility and accessibility over the next few days. So far, it’s been tested on:

• Mac: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino and Rockmelt
• Windows: Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 7
• Mobile Devices: Android

With that said, I could use all the help I could get, so do drop me a comment or email if you find any bugs.

Related posts:

1. New Theme: Seigaiha
2. Nanyate 2010 Re-design: Nami
3. New Theme For Spring (Alpha)!

For those who are interested, here are some technical improvements:

• New font: The font used for Nami‘s logo is “Vegur Light”.
• 960 grid: Before Nami, I’ve always designed according to a self-made Photoshop grid, which was more flexible. But I wanted to give standardized grid a chance. And I’m glad I did since saved me so much time.
• Gravatar: My commenters have been faceless for so long. So um, hello faces!
• jQuery overload: I’ve never liked putting unnecessary scripts on my blog. However, I just couldn’t envision this theme without an animated menu, so I caved in.
• Threaded comments: I’ve finally updated to the WordPress default comment function. Styling it was quite a pain though.

Like all my theme releases, Nami is currently in beta mode. [edit] It’s been tested on all major browsers and is validated. This theme doesn’t support IE6.[/edit] I’ll also be re-writing the about page some time soon. It’s almost 3am. I’ve been coding for 6 hours. Time to get some shuteye.

Your feedback is appreciated.

Please do let me know if you find any bugs! But spare me IE 6 errors. Me and IE 6 don’t get along.

IE is being mean to me

Just thought it’s an appropriate time to share this video.

Related posts:

1. New Theme: Seigaiha
2. A Revolution in My Web Design Philosophy
3. Nanyate?! Gets A 2009 Redesign

Anyway, I’m proud to bring you the final release of Yukata Summer, which works across all browsers (except IE6.. for now) and all resolutions starting from 800×600. There are a few features I added that are worth mentioning since they may help WordPress theme designers.

• WordPress Dynamic Menu Highlighting
  This highlights the page you are currently surfing on your navigation bar. For this site, the highlights extend to the sub-pages. For example, you are currently surfing this post, which is filed under archives, in turn ‘Archives’ in the navigation is highlighted. Check out the WordPress Codex on Dynamic Menu Highlighting for the base code and Conditional Tags to customize this code to suit your needs – like I have done.

• Updated WordPress Thread Comment
  As some of you may already know, Nanyate?! uses WP Thread Comment to allow responses for comments. I think it’s a nifty tool that, although possibly takes away from the design, allows for conversation amongst the commenters and the author. Having a community of bloggers is the best part about blogging for me. So I will pay a great price to have everyone interact with everyone.

  Anyway, this updated version now uses AJAX and has added a feature to email a commenter when the author replies so…Would you personally like to be notified when I reply to your comment? Thanks a lot! Your responses will really help me!

• Resolution Dependent Javascript
  This is by far the coolest addition I’ve made to Nanyate’s layout!! By adding this javascript, my stylesheet will change according the resolution you are using. Actually if you even change the size of your window, you will see the changes between an 800px window and 800+px window. The 800px’ers have the background scrolling with a serving of dieted version of the content column. Everyone else has the background fixed.

  I adopted this Javascript as a compromise for the scroll-happy people who were complaining that having a scroll background hurt their eyes and the 800×600 resolutioners, who because of the height of their screen can’t see much of the background if it’s fixed. I normally don’t like catering for people’s surfing habits or the 800×600 resolution – especially since the Web 2.0 world has RSS feeds if you feel my design doesn’t suit your tastes. But I’ve made this compromise in the name of the illustrator’s pride. That flower took me many hours and 100+ layers to complete. I wasn’t going to throw it away for those with small resolutions and scroll-happy kids who I don’t expect to understand the pain of designing a translucent layout for all browsers and all resolutions.

  Anyway, this javascript might be useful for those of you whose layouts are designed with 800×600 resolutions only or 1024×748 and above only. I have to admit, I tweaked the javascript little to suit my needs. So, just let me know if you need help with the tweaking.

And finally, I’d like to end this post with a big thank you goes to:

• JJ Magazine for the yukata inspiration
• My housemate for lending the magazine to me
• 72Quadrat.de for the layout inspiration
• Seishido.biz for the cherry blossom brush. It was $1 well spent.
• My subscribers, visitors and commenters whose presence and comments continue to inspire me to work harder on this site.

Related posts:

1. New WordPress Plugins!
2. New Theme For Spring (Alpha)!
3. New Theme: Yukata Summer (Beta)