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.
Last week, we retired the blue alien head. New Tumblr users will now get these friendly geometric faces as their default avatar. Adorably, they take their colors from the post type icons.
I love all the playful details that Tumblr builds in and packs away for it’s users.
(via petervidani)
Tumblr has today quietly ticked over the 100 million blog mark, with those blogs containing some 44.6 billion posts… This marks significant growth over the last year, of somewhere around 50 million blogs since April of 2012, when it crossed 50 million for the first time.
(via The Next Web)
(via rickwebb)
Better search!
We’ve completely redone search! Finding the tags and blogs you love is now easier than ever.
Fantastic! Now that the dashboard search is taken care of, I’m hoping to see search working again soon at the blog level.
An upgrade, years in the making…
When we imagined Tumblr more than seven years ago, we dreamed of offering creators a new canvas. Every post would be a raw look through the author’s eyes and mind. We imagined the interface disappearing as these subjects came to life.
For years, this vision was challenged by limits in browser technology and an increasingly daunting set of Tumblr features to support. But today, we take a huge step.
After months of careful crafting, we’ve reduced creation on Tumblr to its essence, while carrying over every single feature and making room for some BIG new ones (like completely customizable drag-and-drop photoset creation, faster uploads, and inline reblogging!). We can’t wait for you to try it.
The upgrades have started rolling out and will be available for everyone by the end of the weekend. Most of the bugs and omissions you’ve reported have already been fixed, but please let us know if you run in to any other issues!
Tumblr’s design, product and engineering team did a fantastic job with this major update to the dashboard. Finally being able to drag files into Photo posts and rearrange photoset grids is a beautiful thing.
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.
One of the common patterns across successful startups is the perilous chasm crossing from startup to wildly successful startup. Finding people, evolving infrastructures, servicing old infrastructures, while handling huge month over month increases in traffic, all with only four engineers, means you have to make difficult choices about what to work on. This was Tumblr’s situation. Now with twenty engineers there’s enough energy to work on issues and develop some very interesting solutions.
A great writeup on the growth challenges Tumblr has faced from infrastructure to hiring the right team of engineers.
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!
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):
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:
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…
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.
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.
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
One of the most exciting things about creating Tumblr themes with Style Hatch is seeing how people and brands use the themes. Earlier this week I had the chance to talk with PUMA about a few of their Tumblr blogs, and I recommend they look into Juuvy since I felt it would be a good fit. Today I noticed that their PUMA Sailing team blog updated their look with Juuvy’s styling.
This site is a perfect example of what brands should be doing on Tumblr. They are posting a good balance of original videos and photography as they continue their 9-month, 39,000 nautical mile sailing journey along with other related reblogs. Whether or not you’re into sailing (how many people actually are) the videos, images and audio that they are posting is fascinating.
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!
Great write-up by Fast Company on Tumblr’s lean and amazing design team a.k.a. the amazing Peter Vidani. By the way, Tumblr is hiring a designer.
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
