Nanyate 2010 Re-design: Nami

March 16, 2010 / Web Design and Development / 33 Comments

Nanyate.com finally gets a new theme for 2010! It’s called ζ³’ nami – Japanese for wave. Not much inspiration here; I simply grew tired of looking at serif fonts on white background. Every blog seems to be going to the minimalist, serif route, so I decided to bring back some color and some sans-serif into the interwebs.

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. πŸ˜›
  • 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! πŸ™‚ 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.



  • JJ

    Pretty! I’ve been meaning to redesign my blog for a while myself but I just haven’t had the time.

    • Ivy

      Thanks! Your career is going well for you so don’t worry so much about blog themes for now. πŸ™‚

  • My internet is slow right now so I had to reload a few times to see your new design. I really like your selection of fresh colours, and I think the dollop of read is really nice. I also like how there is an element of your previous layout that you carried onto this one. As though it tells a story.

    This is totally a soul sister thing, but I am also currently working on a re-design, and the colours that I have chosen are in the same family as yours. And I also have a previous element that I carry from my current (or soon to-be-retired) design. Fret not, they’re gonna be completely different. As if that isn’t obvious already! Haha!

    Sleep tight! I’ll head off to bed myself, too! =)

    • Ivy

      Ooh! Can’t wait to see your layout! And you need to blog more often too. πŸ˜›

  • Apparently, I can’t spell: “a dollop of read”? HAHAHA! I meant “red”. =P

  • nice πŸ™‚ cute menu. I figure, at this point, anyone still using IE6 can go to hell. I mean, seriously. Why???? The only people who have any excuse are those who don’t have admin privileges for their machines and are being forced to use IE6 because it’s still the company standard for some stupid reason. But you know what, those people should just quit their jobs because really, any company like that has got to suck. So no excuses. Firefox for all!

    • Ivy

      Hahaha! True that. Unfortunately, an overwhelming number continue to use IE6 (or so says my stats). But I’ve decided to not support it. It’s too painful since I’m starting to use quite a bit of PNGs and CSS3. Blargh!

    • I know A LOT of people who still use IE. And I keep asking them why, but they can never seem to give a straight answer ;P

  • I love it,especially the colors and the texture … and of course, the big font. What point is it at now?

    • Ivy

      It’s a bit smaller than the last theme since sans serif is generally more readable. I use em for fonts so I’m not sure of the actual point. In pixels, it should roughly be 15 – 16px. πŸ™‚

  • I really like the new theme! =)

  • Oh, nice! I like it! The colours are soothing. πŸ™‚ Great job, Ivy! As always I’m in awed by your designing skills.

  • TiM

    Wow! Very nice design indeed! I particularly like the semi-transparent content boxes around.

    Haha I wouldn’t worry about IE 6 errors at all. At this point, unless there’s a specific reason for, it should be treated as deprecated. XD

    Good luck with the rest of the debugging!

  • Sweeeet! Love the colour and vegur light is such a beautiful typeface!

    The faint texture looks great too but I’m sure it’ll add a lil more touch if you could bring it up a wee bit! Just my 2 cents!

    • Ivy

      Jayden: Point taken. πŸ™‚ The texture is now a lot more obvious. Thanks!

  • nice design.. i’ve been stuck with mine for almost a year =)

  • Beautiful layout!! Very refreshing. πŸ™‚

  • Very simple and chic design. πŸ™‚ Beautiful! Simply gorgeous.

  • I really like it, and the slight texture in the backgrounds brings a very classy look to it πŸ™‚ And the font choice is perfect, especially with the slight gradient.

  • Love the Pong racket on the menu.

    • Ivy

      Game otaku!

  • This theme is beautiful! I love the colour, very calming. πŸ™‚ I like how you have the trademark lantern in this layout too.

    Nice use of text shadows as well, everyone should really move forward to CSS 3 in their designs.

    • Ivy

      Yups, agreed on the CSS3. Too bad there isn’t full browser support yet. I’d love to be able to use @font-face soon.

  • Ivy

    Simply Precious, Tara, Chrizta, Tekkaus & Charlie Thanks! πŸ˜€

  • hey… nice blog, awesome design…

    do drop by n follow mine too

  • It’s so nice to see someone with other interests out there who is so into aesthetics and code. Although I’m quite a newbie to blogging CSS etc., I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time changing and tweaking themes – I’m using Tanzaku on mine (again) finally… which is available on wordpress – it’s source is only japanese and i love the groups aesthetics in general too – thought you might appreciate it since you’re running on japanese inspiration these days. Hoping to be as adept at CSS as well soon – you seem like a very positive person from your about page- would be lovely if you could give me some feedback on my blog

    • Ivy

      For this blog, I build my WordPress themes from scratch. It’s a way for me to keep my skills sharp and up-to-date. With that said, I have come across the Tanzaku theme before. It’s very creative and the JavaScript effects are a nice touch. I haven’t had a chance to look at the code yet so I can’t really say if it’s a good theme aside from its looks.

      I only have one advice for web design newbies. It’s that web design, like any design field, isn’t only about aesthetics. The purpose of design is to solve problems. For web design in particular, the problems your readers face may include being unable to navigate the site, being unable to read (because they’re visually impaired, for example) or being unable to find relevant information easily. So learning about things like typography, usability, information architecture, search engine optimization and accessibility is important too.

      (See this Wikipedia article on Design Thinking for more info.)

      Your site looks good. There are a few things that could be optimized though. Will email that to you over the week.

      Thanks for stopping by!

  • Love this new theme! I really like the colors you used, and as usual, everything just looks great πŸ™‚

    • Ivy

      Thanks Jenny! πŸ™‚

  • I know I’m a little late on this, but I love the redesign! And I keep meaning to add avatars to my comments, they look so plain right now.

    • Ivy

      It’s never too late! I still receive comments on entries I wrote over a year ago. Most of the time, I still reply to them too. πŸ˜€

      You should add avatars! It definitely makes the comments section look more interesting. Here’s how you add gravatars: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Gravatars

  • mars

    Very very pretty! I like this one much more than the previous theme πŸ™‚
    hello colors~

  • it’s beautiful πŸ˜€ you did a really awesome job!