Check out Jazmine’s site – prints and originals are on sale now!

This article is copyright © 2010 

I’m Ian, by the way. I usually write at IanMRountree.com, am a member of the Thoughtwrestling ka-tet, and will be launching another blog soon as well as leisurely working on this one with Yawhann Chong of ChickenBall Design. We’re going to be moving slowly for the next few months – but that’s no reason not to just get started, now that we’re set… At least for the blog itself.

Unspeakable Media is a public repository for the art, works, and projects of creative arts professionals, freelancers, and amateur enthusiasts connected to the web. We’re only launching the blog for the moment, and posting will be sporadic – we apologize – but with so many projects on the go, it’s difficult to commit to the daily schedule we’d love to have. More appropriately, we expect to keep the blog’s schedule informal, and share when we have the material to do so. So – until we make a declaration otherwise – please subscribe to the feed, and treat everything like a bonus. We promise not to clutter your feed readers until we have things worth reading.

Now – that being said, here’s the real plan. The Unspeakable Media blog itself will see a lot of design, development, and especially UX (user experience) entries, as well as some design theory and workflow studies. We’re going to build out from there.

At the top of the main page, you’ll notice a portfolio section. Yawhann and I will be dropping our designs there from time to time, and eventually asking fellow designers to contribute visual goodness – or even some elegant use-case goodness – to this portion of the site. In short, if it’s deliverable, it’s worth putting up. The point is to get people thinking about the many different theories and schools of design and development, because the idea of The Best Practice is swiftly being deprecated as the web gets more dynamic. But more on that later.

We’re building a community here, centered around design and development as an art, and as a big part of how people do business these days. Join us, won’t you?

You can find me (Ian) on Twitter at @IanMRountree, on my blog at IanMRountree.com, and on Facebook or LinkedIn.

You can find Yawhann Chong on his blog, at ChickenBall design, or on Twitter at @ChickenBall.

Please subscribe to this blog – we’ll try to keep the noise down to a dull roar for the forseeable future.

This article is copyright © 2010 

This article is copyright © 2010 

Laut Sprecher places as much focus on the text as possible, treating the tall, colourful header and footer like the covers of a book. I made sure the typography and headers were easy on the eyes, and tried to keep all of the focus on the text.

It’s a fairly minimalist theme, designed both for easy navigation between serialized segments, and for use as a simple blog. I wanted to make sure it stayed true to one purpose; sharing creative writing as broadly as possible.

For ease of use, I included some custom “New post” and “New page” buttons for logged-in users over Contributor level. It’s a small thing, but it can make a difference for fast posting and accessibility.

Future versions may include social networking badges and a better integration of RSS feed choices, as well as some other features if I get any good responses about the theme.

I’m not releasing Laut Sprecher publicly just yet – it’s not ready, and not generic enough at the moment. I’ll be posting both versions of this theme here eventually – at the moment, one is still in use, so it’ll remain by special request only.

This article is copyright © 2010 

This version of the theme was based on the Pretty Spots theme, and borrows some features from a number of other freely available themes from the WordPress Codex. Since the Wings of Wax Project has closed down, and IanMRountree.com is taking a vastly different route as a professional blog, I’m happy to let this one off into the ether – Do what you will with it, and please feel free to leave comments if you manage to fix any of the issues it’s got.

Known issues at the moment include a total failure of the theme options page. Lonely Universe was built to include generated links for Twitter, LinkedIn and facebook profiles on the main page sidebar, as well as a small bio pulled from an About page. the About function was stripped out, and the profiles links designed around, as they were a fairly low priority for debugging.

I’ve also built in a Tumblelog function, which I’ll work on documenting better for subsequent releases.

The theme itself is stable on WordPress 3.0-Beta1, includes seven widgetized areas, and a jQuery-powered dropdown menu for themes and admin for logged-in users, with links based on user role.

Enjoy!

Lonely-Universe-1-0-18 – .zip file

This article is copyright © 2010