Jonathan Moore
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
We finally took the time to set aside three solid weeks to overhaul, perfect, and improve our eighteen premium Tumblr themes. Nearly 200 todo items were crossed off the list and thousands of new lines of code were committed as we sweated over the details. It was a tedious process, but we feel like we owe it to everyone who has bought one of our Style Hatch themes.
Out of all the themes, Swell received the biggest update where I rewrote all of the Javascript that powers the theme. The performance differences before and after are night and day.
Across all the themes, we added support for Tumblr’s new video player for clips you upload, the ability to add your Instagram feed to your blog, new social icons for Github, Instagram and Quora, and a lot of theme specific fixes and improvements.
A big thanks goes to Dominic Butchello on the Tumblr team for quickly approving a flood of updates we submitted over the last few weeks. We’re on hand if you run into any issues with the updates - support@stylehatch.co and @stylehatch
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.
Earlier today MARS—the sixth Style Hatch Tumblr premium theme—went live. Like all the other themes this one is packed full of customization options (over 60) to select from the default, wide and columns layout, change the color scheme, upload background and logo images, integrate Typekit for complete control over the fonts, and much more.
One of my favorite features is the floating dates and tags in the default and wide layout modes. As you scroll down the date and tags intelligently float to the right. Notice how the date takes on the color of the post type.
Early next week I’ll post a demo site showcasing the columns layout that gives you a grid-type layout similar to Inspire Well. Send me an email at mars@stylehatch.co if you have any questions.
Yesterday a collective 140+ updates were pushed live for all of the Style Hatch premium Tumblr themes—Backburner, Inspire Well, Nova, Savory and Traction. The updates included a number of new features, 3rd party support, improvements, feature requests and bug fixes. You can find details of each version update at Backburner 1.3.3, Inspire Well 1.3.0, Nova 1.1.1, Savory 1.0.1, and Traction 1.0.1.
Thinking about picking up a Style Hatch theme? See what people are saying about themes on Twitter.
Also, in the upcoming weeks I will be bringing a few highly talented people on-board full time for Style Hatch and New Ezra. If you dream of clean HTML5 code, get excited about CSS3 transitions, know your way around Photoshop, and love the smell of sunny southern California air send me an email - hello@stylehatch.co
With subtle glowing edges and high-contast elements, Traction is the latest futuristic yet simple three column premium theme from Style Hatch. Choose either the light or dark style and customize your colors, background and 60+ appearance options—see all the customization options. Buy the theme for only $49.
I had a lot of fun building this theme out with the latest HTML5 and CSS3 techniques. If you look closely at the source you’ll notice only three images are being used in the theme at a light-weight 20kb. All of the rounded corners, inner and outer glows, drop shadows, font-face icons, and insets are stylized using CSS3. Plus, I added CSS3 animation touches throughout the theme—try it out by rolling over a few links, linked images, and clicking inside the search bar. If you’re viewing the site on an anchient browser like Internet Explorer everything will degrade nicely to more simplistic design elements.
If you have any other questions about the theme or need support send me an email - traction@stylehatch.co. Also expect updates to Backburner, Inspire Well, Nova and Savory before the end of the year.
This morning a major update to the Inspire Well theme finally went live. With large portions of the theme rewritten and converted to HTML5, the latest update focuses on speed, performance and better layout. After checking the “Use progressive load” option in the Appearances menu you posts should display and layout in the grid almost instantly without waiting on the loading menu. By shaving seconds and milliseconds off the load time Inspire Well now loads up on average 440% faster.
To help with testing and to demo the new infinite scroll option I installed Inspire Well 1.2 on my personal Tumblr site for the day—http://jonathanmoore.com.
If you have already installed Inspire Well and haven’t made any changes to the theme HTML your site has already been upgraded to 1.2.
Yesterday Nova 1.1 finally went live which adds infinite scrolling, a way to insert sidebar boxes for ads or other content, Flickr thumbnail feed, new social icons, and hours of polish improving the theme—see a list of all the changes. Install the theme for $49. Shoot me an email if you have any questions about the theme or need support - nova@stylehatch.co Also, follow us on Twitter @stylehatch for details on other updates, new themes and launches for other platforms.
As always the update is free to those who have already purchased the theme, and as long as you don’t edit the theme HTML the update will happen automatically.
Yesterday afternoon my fourth premium Tumblr theme went live—Savory. The theme design balances out clean typography and UI elements with subtle textures and ‘hand-stitching’. If you look close at the details you’ll notice how blocks of contents cast harder shadows on the left and right sides where the pages have been stitched together. Quite a bit of love went into the design details.
Like the Nova theme, Savory is built with a custom HTML5/CSS3/jQuery framework based on the HTML5 Boilerplate. HTML5/CSS3 does open up quite a few new technical opportunities, but most importantly it has helped streamline the build process.
This latest launch also marks the beginning of a new company Style Hatch—Hand Crafted Digital Goods. Over the next few weeks I will announce more details about the exciting new venture. Follow Style Hatch on twitter for more update and previews of what’s to come.
With nearly 50 appearance options, two layout modes—standard two column and HD-wide one column, black and white versions, and flexibility to change the theme colors as well as the background and header images, Nova is quite possibly the most customizable and flexible premium Tumblr theme. Read the full description and features.
Additionally Nova is built on HTML5/CSS3 using a modified version of HTML5 Reset for the framework making it flexible for future updates and features. As always Nova comes with a great deal of support—if you run into any issues, have suggestions or an idea share it on the theme feedback page or email me personally at nova@newezra.com.
Since Nova is so flexible and customizable I can’t wait to see what you do with the theme—leave a comment as I build a showcase of the best sites using Nova.
Localization—English, German, Japanese, French and Italian, iPad Optimization, better video embeds, updated font support, more Facebook features, Clicky analytics, and much more!
Yesterday Tumblr just approved an rolled out a fairly major update to my Backburner theme. The 1.3 update is packed full of new features, optimization, and better Tumblr support. Install Backburner for only $19. See the full list of updates below:
See all the Backburner changes and version history
This morning my second premium theme, Inspire Well, finally went live! Inspire Well is a flexible and modular premium Tumblr theme that is perfect for creative inspiration, photo/video blog for your new iPhone 4, designer’s portfolio, and documenting family life.
With Inspire Well 1.0 you have complete creative freedom in customizing your site and control over the unique grid layout that lets you post small, medium and large posts. With 38 options in the Appearance menu you can upload your own background, change the theme colors, adjust the layout, and define icon links to 20 popular social sites. Inspire Well supports the full array of Tumblr functionality, 3rd-party support for Disqus, social sharing on Facebook and Twitter, lightbox for full-res post images and many more services planned in the future (free) updates.
Check out the primary demo site for Inspire Well as well as the demo sites showing how it’s used as a mobile photo blog, creative portfolio, and sharing family life.
The latest Backburner theme release includes the ability to upload custom header images (a highly requested features) as well as quite a few changes behind the scenes that improve performance and addressed bugs.
The theme is still only $19 in the Tumblr premium theme store.
Backburner version 1.1.2 now supports Facebook’s new Like button for each post. This post walks you through the steps to customize and integrate the Like button into your own theme.
Backburner 1.1 was just submitted this morning for approval that is full of improvements, new features, and changes. One new feature is the Share This tool below each post. If you roll over the button you can copy the short URL, retweet using TweetMeme or share on Facebook.
In the upcoming Backburner 1.1.1 release I will be adding in support for Bit.ly which allows you to use their URL shortener and even roll your own shortener domain name with Bit.ly Pro.
Backburner comes with options to select three unique styles in the Appearance menu. Preview the styles at http://backburnertheme.tumblr.com/.
