It is no secret that space is extremely tight in Hong Kong. Tiny, box-sized apartments are the norm and high-density living has naturally resulted in the necessity to be innovative with the use of both public and private space. I have friends who have been very clever in manipulating interior design effects to enlarge the perception of a small space, but not one has gone to lengths as spectacular as those of architect Gary Chang. Creating what he refers to as the “Domestic Transformer”, Chang has managed to squeeze 24 individual rooms into a small apartment, measuring 330 square feet, by means of sliding panels and walls.

Man's best friend

I am a writer turned illustrator and I work from my home office/studio in a terrific little valley on the coast of Cape Town. After working in advertising for a little while (where i was in a creative team with my oldest brother Patrick – me copywriting and him art directing) I decided to go it alone and freelance. But a lesson I soon learned was that the best way to make sure of a steady income as a freelancer is to diversify. So I began illustrating as well as writing. Nowadays it’s mostly illustration for me, which is great – plus a bit of cartooning work in The Western Nostril. But I haven’t stopped there – I have recently completed my first children’s book called The Boy Who Cried Ninja for which I have an agent and soon (I hope) a publisher.

The Western Nostril is a cartoon that my brother and I started nine years ago while I was still at university. Somewhere along the line the good people at Business Day saw it and loved it and offered to pay to have it in their paper four days a week. Currently we’re gearing up to publish our second collection of Western Nostrils which will be out in South Africa in time for Christmas. We’re still patiently awaiting our breakthrough into the global market.

My work process: I don’t really like to put pencil to paper before I have a good/weird idea behind what I’m trying to illustrate (and the same goes for writing). Often a stroll up a mountain with my dogs will help that along (see picture) – fresh air and exercise does wonders. Once the idea is there, I return home and sketch it with pencil onto sheets of A4 paper and scan it in to my computer. Then in Photoshop I fix any skew lines with the liquify tool (it feels like cheating, but apparently it’s not) and I begin colouring and adding textures and shadows. I usually don’t know what an illustration will look like before it’s done – so the process is quite exciting as I watch strange people, creatures and buildings take shape.

I’ve lost the Digital Farm branding, seeing I am no longer freelancing under that intended name and it only causes confusion. I’ve changed my vibrant, bright colour palette for a more pastel, earthy one, and I collaborated with the awesome Cape Town based illustrator Alex Latimer to design me some header and footer graphics.

I gave Alex quite a detailed brief as to the illustrations I wanted, but the end result far exceeded my expectations. The illustrations portray my personality and half baked nationality to a tee. The little springbok and warthogs being chased by the big dinosaur from South Africa (represented by our lovely Table Mountain and the Johannesburg skyline) to England (represented by Big Ben) are all us South Africans flocking to the money, adventures and travel opportunities Europe has to offer, whilst the lone springbok that appears when you hover over my logo represents the urge we all face in wanting to go back to our fantastic country as soon as possible, especially in the winter months :)

I’ve definitely placed more emphasis on my twitter stream, as us lazy WooThemes designers are tending to micro-blog these days. The ajax powered sidebar module tracks not only my tweets, but the chit-chat I have with others.

The “underground” footer section represents my sometimes claustrophobic home office setup with news from the office and my latest photos.

My page and post content styling still needs some work, as does my portfolio. I also still have some ideas for my Web Startups pages, but after sitting on this design for a good month I think it is time to unleash it.

Please do let me know what you think and if you would be so kind share the news via a tweet.

Since March this year we’ve been working on the WooThemes re-design – code name Woo2. Looking back over all the mockups housed in our Basecamp account it’s amazing to see how it grew and matured. Having a team of 5 web designers working on the project, makes it sound a doddle, but this was certainly not the case!

Trusting your team mates

Magnus, myself and Cobus all worked originally on mock ups of the home page, each of us proud of our work and trying to influence each other as to why elements of our designs worked better than others. Weeks passed and more and more mock ups were made until we got to a point where we realised we were going around in circles, we were not being productive, and the launch date was getting pushed further and further out. At that point we decided we needed to hand over the Woo2 design responsibilities to one of us and feedback needed to be in a consolidated form, with us trusting that designer whole-heartedly with the brand. Cobus was the lucky one chosen.

Once Cobus was handed over the reigns some serious brain storming was done over Skype conversations and whiteboard sketches at WooThemes Head Quarters in Cape Town, South Africa. The home page was sliced into modules with the header navigation, followed by a visual featured space suming up what we are about. Below this was a space for our offerings and our key selling points. We then wanted to show how easy it is to get your website up and running so made space for the WooThemes purchase process. Next was a space showcasing our social media presence in the form of a blog summary, a twitter feed, an email subscription form and our affiliate offering. Finally was a neat sitemap for quick and easy access to all our main pages.

The colours in the Woo2 design needed to be a bit brighter and warmer than that of the cooler and darker original design. The typeface we chose for the headers – Geogrotesque – was a bit more chunky and modern, not to mention far more memorable and uniquely WooThemes, than the Lucida Grande font we had used previously.

You probably have not even noticed, but even the logo received a bit of love. We softened the colours and lightened the bubble gradient, as well as applied a faint inner glow

For the club membership page we needed the content to be presented neatly and prominently as to eliminate the bulk of the pricing and membership queries that we were getting previously. We are huge fans of 37 Signals and had many Skype chats over how we could use sections of their hugely popular design and layout without copying it. Here we introduced some shades of green and yellow to break the blue branding seen predominantly around the site.

Nearly every page was meticulously designed in Photoshop by Cobus, but even before that we mocked up some pages with basic wireframe sketches.

Once all the awesome mock ups had been made and signed off by the team it was over to the Magatron html/css and WordPress chop shop. The design was of course implemented on a Woo Framework that comes packaged with all our latest WooThemes making the build phase far less time consuming and far more flexible in structure.

Whilst this was all happening the backend was being reviewed, and of course more wireframe sketches were being drafted for our third party Amember developer to work on and implement on a test server. Magnus’s wordpress work was being polished by Foxinni with lots of awesome javascript animations and transistions being added. Content was being re-written, theme documents were re-organised, terms and conditions were tweaked and the forum, showcase and newly created WooCamp were all given shiny new templates to fit the Woo2 branding. This of course all the while we were still doing our usual WooThemes tasks of creating themes, supporting themes, answering mail, collaborating with designers and fuelling the marketing machine.

I could write another 1000 words on the re-design, the new content management systems we’ll soon be catering for and our new GPL licensing, instead though I’d prefer you to visit the site yourself, have a look around and hopefully enjoy the fine-tuned website. Also have a look at Adii’s video post on the launch of Woo2.

It’s amazing to be a part of such a dynamical and bright team at WooThemes and I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished in a relatively short time frame.

Now that Woo2 is done and dusted I hope to find sometime to re-design this site, but as you can see from our design process for Woo2, this may take a bit of time…