Early this year .net magazine asked me to write a feature article for their April publication as an introduction and guide to Tumblr for web designers who aren’t familiar with Tumblr. The 3,700 word article covers my personal experience with Tumblr, the community, going mobile, and themes. If you’re already using Tumblr chances are nothing will be new to you, but if you do read it send me a reply on Twitter and let me know what you think - @newezra
Yesterday the latest Style Hatch theme, Ascender, went live on the Tumblr premium themes garden. Ascender is an evolution of the popular Transcender theme with a grid layout, better styling for the built in light and dark modes and full Typekit support.
The first update for the theme is already in production which will include infinite scrolling, better iPhone/iPad support so that you can disable the default Tumblr iPhone theme, and a few other surprises. All the theme updates are free and automatic, and they come with Zappos-like (or Nordstroms if you prefer) customer support. Email - ascender@stylehatch.co
Check out the demo sites - Light version with a smaller grid | Dark version with a larger grid
Tumblr is a truly unique hybrid. It sits squarely in the center of the Media Cloverleaf. It’s highly social, with an incredibly engaged community and connective tissue to the aforementioned hubs. It offers most of the benefits of the large blog platforms (eg Owned media). […]
It became clear to me in recent months that there is no other platform has the full Media Cloverleaf in its wraps the way Tumblr does. So moving to Tumblr seemed like the perfect way for me to walk my talk and engage across all four clovers with a maximum return on my time.
Finally, the latest Style Hatch premium theme, Swell is live! Although the design is a bit more on the simplistic side there is an insane amount of detail that went into the build and overall experience. Early next week I’ll write up a post going into the details of how I pull off some of the more intense features. For now, here’s an overview of some of my favorite features:
After seeing real-world usage of Swell I already have a growing list of tweaks and improvements for the theme. Most of them are focused on increasing performance so that the theme is lightning fast when hundreds of posts are on the page at once. Across all the Style Hatch themes I’ve pushed live nearly 100 updates, so this is only the beginning.
If you have any questions, ideas or issue email me personally at swell@stylehatch.co. I always try to get to emails within a day with the exception of weekends and holidays.
At the beginning of May I decided to start taking a portion of each theme’s sales to give back and help do good in developing countries. Now, for every 5 themes sold 1 person will be given access to clean water through Charity Water. At the close of the month I will share more details, including the ability to track and see specific freshwater projects that were made possible through Style Hatch. I really hope that this doesn’t come across as a marketing gimmick. Honestly I’m extremely excited to give back to something that makes a real difference. Already hundreds of people will be helped. Learn more about what Charity Water is doing—Why Water?
There is a lot going on behind the scenes with Style Hatch right now as I’m working to launch even more premium Tumblr themes and move to other platforms (no plans for Wordpress themes). On Monday Jess Brown, my first full-time employee, starts working with me at New Ezra and Style Hatch. His official role will be the director of customer experience which will cover support, outreach, as well as many other things. The future is extremely bright!
Earlier today major updates just went live for all six of the Style Hatch premium Tumblr themes. Now all of the themes have Typekit support built in making it much easier to customize the fonts, as well as a number of other improvements and bug fixes. Including the latest updates, this brings the total number of theme updates to 56 since the first theme launched nearly a year ago.
The next round of updates will introduce image light boxes across the themes and support for the new Instagram API.
If you need help with your theme, have questions or even a suggestion I always do my best to reply in less than a day, with a bit slower responses over the weekend. hello@stylehatch.co
View the demo site backburnertheme.tumblr.com | Purchase Backburner for $19 | Email backburner@stylehatch.co for support
View the demo site inspirewell.tumblr.com & inspirewell-photo.tumblr.com | Purchase Inspire Well for $49 | Email inspirewell@stylehatch.co for support
View the demo site novatheme.tumblr.com & novatheme-hd.tumblr.com | Purchase Nova for $49 | Email nova@stylehatch.co for support
View the demo site savorytheme.tumblr.com | Purchase Savory for $49 | Email savory@stylehatch.co for support
View the demo site transcendertheme.tumblr.com | Purchase Transcender for $49 | Email transcender@stylehatch.co for support
View the demo site marstheme.tumblr.com & marstheme-columns.tumblr.com | Purchase MARS for $49 | Email mars@stylehatch.co for support
It was exciting to hear the Tumblr engineers discuss at Technically Speaking some of the new technologies and services like Scribe and Hadoop that help them improve the performance of the platform and allow for an insane amount of growth in the future. Tumblr’s future is incredibly bright.
Hey look at that… I managed to make it into David’s shot at the far right.
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.
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.
The more people we have on our team, the less room there is in the elevator and the more complicated everything gets.
- David Karp
Tumblr’s building does have a tiny elevator. When I stopped by a few weeks ago somehow we were all able to squeeze in there along with Pasquale D’Silva. Well done Tumblr team for recovering from the short (relatively) outage. I can only imagine how intense the last 48 hours have been for the whole team.
Via Startup Quote
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”
Igor Stravinsky
This quote summarizes one of the many things I love about the Tumblr platform. When designing a theme for Tumblr the simplicity of the Tumblr feature set provides an excellent constraint that helps us (Style Hatch) focus on “precision of execution”.
Via Jonathan Snook’s presentation “The Future of Cross-Platform Front-End Development” at FOWD NYC.
Great looking CSS grid framework by Andy Taylor that is designed for 1280px wide monitors, but scales all the way down to mobile resolutions. Don’t be surprised if this ends up in a future Style Hatch premium Tumblr theme.
Next week I’ll post more details about several of the upcoming themes that’ll be launching soon. Lots of exciting projects in the works!
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.
ABC News Radio is in the process of customizing the Backburner theme. Check out the other premium themes I have available through Tumblr.
If anyone from ABC News Radio is out there, email me. I’d love to help you customize the theme so that it’s looking great.
