About two months ago now a friend of mine asked me to help him out by building him a website for a startup he was working with. Naturally I asked for some more information about the company and he told me they were going to do roadside barbeque and catering. For me, living in New York City, this seemed like a crazy idea but then I took a step back and considered where he was living (Central Pennsylvania) and thought this could work. Fortunately he wasn’t asking me for money or any kind of investment save some time and expertise.

What he needed was a web presence for this company and what I needed was a project I had heavy front-end involvement in but didn’t sit behind a login screen. There were not a lot of design assets for the company or website, basically a color scheme and a logo. The major feature he needed was a calendar to quickly illustrate where the company affiliated trucks were going to be. So I went with a fairly simple design which resembled a business flyer but provided plenty of space for content.

Since the calendar section was the big piece of dynamic content I spent the most time developing it and considering how the interaction would play out. Overall I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. The catering section of the site is, as yet, incomplete but since the company kicked off sales on the first of May they were a little anxious to have some kind of web presence even if they didn’t have the catering content ready yet. So as of this writing the gallery section has no images (but they just need to be dropped into a folder on the server to work) and the catering section is under construction, however, my first solo freelance project has gone live and I wanted to share.

Check out the Banty Brothers website

In starting to use this blog again I have come to the conclusion that I am not particularly fond of any of the themes I’ve used, probably in large part because I’m not totally sure where to start in order to customize them. As a result I think I’m going to take a foray into creating my own theme but for now I think I’m going to leave the ‘classic’ wordpress theme in place because I like it’s minimalist approach.

I do have a curiosity though, where can I find the set of test posts used on some of the theme websites? If anyone finds this and knows I’d appreciate the help. I think I’m going to try and keep the theme I create a minimal, two-column, fluid theme. Structure first, layout later.

I’ve had my iPhone for a little while but I had, up until recently, refused to jailbreak or unlock it. This past Saturday though I was browsing around and came up ZiPhone again and after talking to several other people who have jailbroken their devices with no problems I decided to give it a shot.

Happily, my experience has been quite good so far. In fact I spent a while on Saturday downloading and checking out a bunch of different apps which have been developed for the iPhone. The most interesting of the apps I downloaded is maybe Twinkle which is a native Twitter iPhone application which includes a geolocator options. So you can see tweets of other users in your area from people using Twinkle, which is pretty awesome.

I also took quite a liking to SummerBoard and it’s themes. The eGlass theme in particular. Which is really what leads me to the point of this post, a totally roundabout way I know. Anyway so I started grabbing applications, and then I found this theme I really liked. Problem was the icons for the eGlass theme look pretty much uniform, a black pillbox background with grey icon, and a number of the new iPhone applications available through the installer did not have acceptable icons for this theme.

Fortunately I found the post on ModMyiFone for this theme and in it the developer had posted the pillbox background. So all that was left was to put my Photoshop skills to the test! Well, I’ll tell you what, if it had been an actual test my Photoshop skills would have failed miserably. Needless to say I made extensive use of the shapes tool in order to get some decent looking icons for the Lexitron, Twinkle, iCalls, and iShare applications. Oddly enough the iShare icon, the last one I did, looks much worse than any of the others.

If there is interest in the icons I can make them available (not that I have a reader base at this point!).