style hatch | Jonathan Moore

Apr

23

Origin West

Our 16th Style Hatch premium Tumblr theme is finally live! With Origin West theme I set my well-worn creative hat to the side and put on my developer hat to bring Nick Jones’ design to life. With a highly unique layout (responsive too with a mobile version), high contrast and lots of animating details who knows if it’ll be a popular theme but I certainly had a blast developing it. Check out the demo site at originwest.stylehatch.co!

One of the beautiful things about designing products rather than servicing clients is how you have complete freedom to take on the experimental and challenging projects. We could probably make far more money by focusing on popular design trends, quickly cranking out more themes or skipping the details, but to be honest we’re having way too much fun releasing themes with lots of love and attention.

If you have any questions about the theme send us an email at originwest@stylehatch.co or a tweet @stylehatch.

Apr

13

Theme Updates - Spotify & Pinterest

As soon as we got the details on the new Spotify player on Tumblr, Jess and I put in some long hours over the last two days (and nights) to pulled off major updates to all 15 of our Style Hatch Tumblr themes.

In addition to support for the Spotify player, we added Pinterest’s ‘pin it’ button to the share options. We will be publishing a full list of changes soon since some of the themes got quite a bit of additional love.

If you have any questions send us an email at support@stylehatch.co or hit us up on Twitter @stylehatch. Now we can get back to wrapping up a bunch of new themes we have lined up!

Mar

15

“Oh that’s really cool! I’ve never heard of ppl using fb to do customer support!! Most just try to shove items in our face and expect us to buy things off fb!! Lol”

- Cher C., in reply to Style Hatch’s support on Facebook that we just rolled out

If you or the brand you work with has “Facebook eCommerce page” anywhere our your social media strategy, you should fire your team. Ok, that might be a bit harsh, but the truth is people interact with brands on Facebook to have a personal connection not have them “shove items in our face”.

Facebook and social media belong in the customer experience world, not “oh look we can sell our stuff there too”.

Mar

08

Style Hatch Refresh

Just a few hours ago we debuted our fresh, new branding for Style Hatch along with a taste of our full site launching in April. After over a decade of creating sites, campaigns and brand strategies for large brands from Activision to Microsoft, we have shifted out entire studio to create fresh designs for individuals with the goal of helping you show off your inner genius.

We can’t wait to show off everything we have lined up! Now for a few fun facts, since our first theme Backburner we have launched 15 themes, pushed live 109 updates to the themes, and answered 27,697 support emails as of yesterday morning.

A part of the refresh we even had fancy new letterpress cards created just in time for SXSW. Check out a shot of the cards on Dribbble.

Mar

02

How to Hustle SXSW for Fun & Profit

Heading to SXSW Interactive this year? Danielle Morrill put together a great article on how to get the most out of SXSW including prepping your calendar (don’t do it) and prepare like a soccer mom on crack.

This year our entire Style Hatch team—all three of us @Moore, @iJess and @krisnicolemoore—are packing and heading to Austin for the week. We’re putting together the details for a mini-event since we would love to meet you in person and buy you a drink.

Email us at sxsw@stylehatch.co or send us a tweet @stylehatch with #sxsw, and we will hook you up next week.

Feb

03

A Friday afternoon snapshot of my desk at the Style Hatch office.

Coco Theme

Check out our latest Tumblr premium theme Coco! It comes in three beautiful styles, but you can always customize it like the comic and art blog Magical Game Time with a few tweaks in the appearances menu.

Digital shop, Style Hatch and designer Regina Casaleggio, are pleased to welcome the latest arrival to the scene, Coco, a sweet, charming, sophisticated, theme with lots of heart and soul. This beauty is “out of the box” ready to enjoy and be shown to the world. To keep this one-of-a-kind masterpiece from being altered from its original state of beauty the customization features are limited.

Buy Coco for $49 and take advantage of our stellar support - coco@stylehatch.co

Really this post was a good excuse to try out Tumblr’s new KILLER highlighted post feature. You guys are pretty brilliant!

Jan

23

adidas NEO Label

It interesting watching brands navigate their way onto Tumblr. The ones that do well clearly understand the unique culture behind the Tumblr community. Brands and everyone on Tumblr should take these guidelines for posting to heart in this order (Source - Seth Godin | The TED imperatives):

Be interested.
Be generous.
Be interesting.
Connect.

As a bonus they did a fantastic job customizing our Style Hatch premium theme Juuvy. Other brands that we have noticed who are doing great job on Tumblr and using one of our themes:

Kate Spade (Swell)
Nike ID (MARS)
Puma (Juuvy)
Alternative Apparel (Swell)
Travel Channel (Atlantic Noir)
Lucky Magazine (Swell)
Men’s Health (Juuvy)
Quiksilver (Swell/Atlantic Noir hybrid)
X Games (Backburner)
Time Magazine (Inspire Well)
Ben and Jerry (Nova)
Fab (MARS)
Photojojo (Inspire Well)

Jan

06

Look Back at 2011: Most Popular Themes

Tumblr gives you complete control over all aspects of your blog, and once you know some HTML, you can make them look pretty much any way you want! On the other hand, many of us would rather benefit from the skills of the thousands of brilliant designers whose work is featured in the Tumblr Theme Garden.

The top themes of 2011 were…

The Minimalist

Inspire Well

Wow! That certainly made our week here at Style Hatch. We have some pretty amazing new themes in the works that will be debuting over the next few weeks, including our new Artist Series with a curated collection of preset styles. 2012 is going to be a fantastic year.

Dec

29

I think that social blogging platforms like Tumblr may see a huge growth in 2012. Your designs are helping lead the way in responsive and more customisable themes.

I no longer believe in web designers taking thousands of pounds to design a small biz web presence. Social is doing more to drive traffic, and I think it can stand up as strong as seo driving new customers.

An excerpt of a Style Hatch support email we got earlier today. Small businesses need for expensive, custom designed online presence is declining as more of them turn to platforms like Tumblr, Virb, Squarespace and others.

Highly skilled and strategic web designers and studios will always deliver value to small businesses, but mediocre designers should be worried.

Dec

19

Penman Theme

Earlier this morning we just submitted Penman as our thirteenth premium Tumblr theme. With an oversized layout and a focus on typographical details it’s a perfect fit for those of you who want to post high resolution images and videos as well as longer text posts. Along with all our other Style Hatch themes, Penman is completely responsive with a layout that adapts from large resolution monitors down to tablets and smartphones.

On a more technical side, this theme was our first to experiment with combining the HTML5 History API with infinite scrolling. As you load additional pages through infinite scrolling you will notice that the URL updates (penmantheme.tumblr.com/page/2). This allows you to hit back on your browser and pick up where you left off if you click a link off from the blog.

To get an idea of how flexible Penman is, check out our alternate demo site Penman Dark featuring an all dark appearance.

If you have any questions about Penman feel free to email us at penman@stylehatch.co

Oct

06

Studio Sweet Studio

Several months ago I stumbled on the original Studio Sweet Studio blog created and currated by Meg Lewis and Tuesday Bassen. The duo created Studio Sweet Studio to feature the workspace and process of artists, illustrators and designers. After discovering their blog I reached out to Meg to see if she was interested in creating a theme for Style Hatch, and a few weeks later Juuvy was born.

Last week I was thrilled to get an email from Meg letting us know that they were in the process of moving Studio Sweet Studio over to Tumblr. They both did a fantastic job customizing and hacking our Atlantic Noir theme.

Go follow Studio Sweet Studio on Tumblr. You will not regret it.

Sep

23

“Juuvy is oh-so juicy, like a big, plump orange. The pulp even gets stuck in your teeth to make the flavor last even longer. I’m talkin’ heavy pulp, not medium. Medium to no pulp is for free theme users.”

The Virtual Biographers, from the Juuvy theme feedback page

This might my favorite review of one of our themes. We’re all about heavy pulp.

Sep

16

Juuvy

Digital shop Style Hatch is proud to debut Juuvy, a fashionable chic modular grid with adjustable post sizes!

I was thrilled when Meg Lewis (Ghostly Ferns) agreed to collaborating with us on the design of Juuvy. She did a fantastic job! Make sure you check out her site and follow her on Tumblr and Twitter.

Like all of our other premium Tumblr themes, Juuvy comes jam packed with features that allow you to customize virtually everything including the colors, layout, typography, and adding social features. Check out the Juuvy demo site and Juuvy York for a different dark flavor. Pick up Juuvy on Tumblr for $49, and as always feel free to email us questions!

Sep

02

Verge Theme

Yesterday our 10th premium theme Verge went live live on Tumblr! Verge is a unique side scrolling theme with individual post width control, similar to Inspire Well. Just add “xs”, “xx” or “xl” tags to each post to set the widths to small (250px), medium (500px) or large (620px). Also, if you want to switch things up with a dark theme you can switch Verge to a black mode in the Appearance settings. More details on the features…

I’m extremely happy how this collaboration with designer Nick Jones turned out. As I was building the theme out I wanted to make sure the theme was full of small details that make Verge feel unique. For the ribbon style page titles I used Paravel’s Lettering.js typography plugin to handle the correct padding on line breaks and positioning of the corner turns. Using media queries to target mobile devices Verge looks beautiful on both an iPhone and iPad. Also, throughout the theme you’ll notice a number of subtle animated elements that are powered by CSS3 animations and occasionally triggered by jQuery.

If you have ideas, suggestions or questions let us know - verge@stylehatch.co