8 July 2009
Welcome to the new ThinkVitamin!
Welcome to the brand new ThinkVitamin! We’ve made a couple big changes around here so I wanted to explain what’s happening and why. We are so thankful for all of you, our readers, and we want to work even harder to deliver a valuable and interesting blog for you. Here’s what’s going on …
More Valuable Content
We’ve added two new things:
- Short daily posts on interesting news, creative ideas, new web tech and valuable links. These will be going into the main article feed. We will also still be posting quick news snippets to our Twitter-driven News Feed.
- A new ‘Learn’ section. These will be articles based on videos and presentations from Carsonified events like FOWA and FOWD. We’re launching with three articles for you:
- Get Clients to say Yes! by Paul Boag
- Get Started with DNS by Chris Lea
- How to Make Money off Your By-Products by Jason Fried.
We’ve also uploaded two audio files from the Learn section (in podcast format), which you can grab and listen to on the way to work.
In case you’re one of our 33,000+ RSS subscribers who hasn’t seen the re-design, feel free to stop by the site and check it out.
We’re still going to be posting one long ‘feature’ article per week. These will continue to cover all the design, development and web entrepreneurship topics you’re interested in.
Merging the Carsonified Blog and ThinkVitamin
Carsonified has been running two blogs, and as a small company, we felt that we were spreading ourselves too thin. The best way to serve you guys, our awesome readers, is to combine our efforts into one blog – and really put 110% effort into it. Therefore, we’ve decided to combine ThinkVitamin and the Carsonified blog, into one valuable blog for web designers, developers and entrepreneuers.
The new site will live at carsonified.com/blog and anyone heading to thinkvitamin.com will be re-directed. All the old content from both Carsonified and ThinkVitamin will still work.
New Design
If you’re one of our faithful RSS subscribers, you won’t know this, but we’ve just re-designed the entire site (and the Carsonified site). ThinkVitamin hasn’t been properly re-designed since we launched it back in April 2006, so we felt it was time for a fresh re-design. Mike Kus, our amazing designer here at Carsonified, has added a bit of flair to the design, whilst also making it easier to navigate and read. We hope you like it!
Keep up-to-date
There are several ways you can subscribe to ThinkVitamin content:
- Article RSS – All the main posts and features
- News RSS – Our Twitter powered news feed
- Podcast – Audio recordings of talks from our events
- @carsonified – Focusing on news, thoughts and ideas for Web Professionals like you
Your Feedback
We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas, so please share in the comments below. Look forward to hearing from you!
Enjoy this article?
If you liked this article, feel free to re-tweet it to let others know. Thanks, we appreciate it :)
We love .net Magazine
We're big fans of .net so they've hooked us up with a rad deal: Save 50 percent on your subscription.
kat neville
# July 9, 2009 - 4:59 pm
Nicely done Mike. I love the style of the blog, but I especially love the new carsonified site. Definitely a great site for the people that have created a conference called “Future of Web Design”! Now you’re making me all jealous… but in a good way! Way to step up your game for this one.
(I see you too have gone for the ultra huge comment form like elliot jay stocks. I can’t miss the submit your comment button, that’s for sure.)
Matt
# July 9, 2009 - 5:08 pm
Guys, you have truly outdone yourselves. Trying to think of a superlative to describe your new website, but i’m lost for words. It is simply the dog’s bollocks as we say up north.
Michael Caputo
# July 9, 2009 - 5:35 pm
Lovin’ the new design guys!
Brade
# July 9, 2009 - 5:39 pm
Stellar job, Mike and co. Love the bold colors and the zany imagery! This is one of the most noteworthy website designs I’ve seen in a while.
Simon
# July 9, 2009 - 6:21 pm
I like the new look for the website but it feels incomplete; the header just seems to be plonked there and doesn’t really feel connected to what’s below it, like its missing a background graphic – but I am a developer not a designer so take it with a pinch of salt.
John (Human3rror)
# July 9, 2009 - 6:45 pm
hawt! good stuff.
Francis
# July 9, 2009 - 7:48 pm
Hi there ! Really love the new carsonified.com !! Love the blog too but I think it is too conventional. I mean the design is great but not really original like carsonified.com. Maybe that is just the background color that is too neutral to me !! ;-)
John Faulds
# July 9, 2009 - 9:03 pm
Loving the new design in general but found your team page, Ryan, to be a bit harsh on the eyes. The yellow’s too bright especially with the contrasting elements being white.
Nick Lindwall (Coolbox)
# July 9, 2009 - 9:23 pm
Fantastic site folks, really love it. I thought the people pages were great and I like the illustrations, backgrounds not too bright either ;)
Frank
# August 26, 2009 - 2:02 pm
Wow, really cool new features and really cool new design. Well done!
Ryan Carson
# July 9, 2009 - 9:26 pm
@John Faulds – Thanks for the feedback. We’re considering options for the colour of my bio page.
carlnunes
# July 9, 2009 - 10:23 pm
I really like the logo background shape.
The layout looks fun, light, and efficient!
The FEB50C page is fine because the bio pages level of importance(readability) is low enough to warrant some smart/fun colors.
DADECC works for me.
chad engle
# July 9, 2009 - 11:38 pm
Ryan,
The redesign looks great! I really like what you have done with the idea of the design and not being conventional. It was a point we touched on last night during ChatCreative. The guys from @Obox talked about pushing the limits and not copying people. Nice look and feel. Love it.
Cheers,
-Chad
John
# July 10, 2009 - 8:05 am
I like this design a whole lot more than the last one, which quite frankly never looked finished and never appeared coherent or even “designed”. This design, and the integration of the ThinkVitamin into the main website now seems to make more sense of the Carsonified brand (or what ever you want to define it as). I think this evolution shows what a unified design can do and how in good design everything fits together and looks as though it has been thought about and considered.
I am not a fan of the “big” look, which recently seems to be getting even bigger and I would still say a reduction of 10 or 20% on the scale of the graphics/layout would be an improvement – especially to anyone with a 1024×768 monitor. But I appreciate your audience are less likely to be running such a low res set up. So while I disagree with the scale I can accept the reasoning why it’s been done at that size.
On a strategy level, there’s no mention of Carsonified doing web development work. I thought that was part of the new Carsonified plan. Has that now changed? This site and what you appear to be offering as a company seems a lot more coherent (as an events/training/workshop company) but having said that I was under the impression you were diversifying and therefore I would have expected something about that on the site. Has this position changed? I can see it would have diluted some of the core messages of the site and your vision, so I wondered if you omitted it for those reasons or simply because you’re no longer going down that road.
Ryan Carson
# July 10, 2009 - 8:29 am
Hey John,
Thanks for the feedback. The reason why we’re not talking about doing design/dev work for other people is because we only do it occasionally.
Thanks,
Ryan
John
# July 10, 2009 - 8:34 am
Ryan, that makes perfect sense.
Manny
# July 10, 2009 - 10:17 am
awesome design, this site rocks. Thanks for a great resource.
websolutions
# July 10, 2009 - 11:31 am
Good job Mike! The site looks beautiful and to the point. Congratulations!
personal finance
Ryan Carson
# July 10, 2009 - 1:30 pm
@Chad – thanks mate!
Rick Hocutt
# July 10, 2009 - 1:41 pm
Hey guys,
for whatever reason the header for http://www.carsonified.com/blog is a little messed up in Firefox 3.0.11 on the Mac. Changing #latest-news { clear:left;} to #latest-news { clear:both;} seemed to fix it. This also didn’t have any adverse affects on the PC.
Take care!
Daan
# July 10, 2009 - 3:39 pm
One word: Fugly
Kaspars
# July 10, 2009 - 7:31 pm
i just love it :)
Great job guys
John Faulds
# July 11, 2009 - 2:14 am
Just another small point – the link to the comments at the top of the page points to #comments but it appears that ID doesn’t exist in the page.
Rajesh Satyarthi
# July 11, 2009 - 7:01 am
Finally a good design worth vitamin, ever since vitamin get redesigned back in 2006 i thought how such quality blog lost its brand using a pre-made blog theme.
Now i am satisfied, clear, concise and colors are great. love the curvy-speech-bubble effect on main navigation. fonts are good sized, color scheme is beautiful. and footer is awesome.
blackabee
# July 11, 2009 - 10:08 am
beautiful updates. thanks for staying fresh.
Alieu Colley
# July 11, 2009 - 11:02 am
What a nice blog site. I’d like this blog and the brand new ThinkVitamin.
ANSQERON
# July 12, 2009 - 2:04 pm
Oh, it’s pretty nice to see the new clean design! Actually, I was wondering what’s up with my feedreader when I saw this post.
I really like the change and I enjoy seeing quality stuff over here. Thank you.
John Faulds
# July 13, 2009 - 10:20 pm
OK, last one I promise: on some articles, the actual number of comments doesn’t match up with the number of comments reported, i.e., on the ‘How to Design a Portfolio Site’ article at the moment there are 5 comments but the speech bubble at the top and the h4 before the list says there are 10.
Ryan Carson
# July 14, 2009 - 4:24 am
Hey John,
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s currently counting spam comments in that total. It’s on our list of fixes :)
Best,
Ryan
Carsonified Summer Camp – Part 2
# July 23, 2009 - 6:01 pm
[...] and also general design tips and philosophies that he believes in. He took us through the recent Carsonified re-design and showed us some of the designs that he rejected and didn’t make it to the live version, [...]
Ruben Bos
# July 24, 2009 - 8:59 am
I think this redesign is really interesting. I always knew that Think Vitamin existed and that it featured great articles on webdesign. But somehow, I just never visited the website. And now after all these years of difficult layouts etc. it has changed into a simple blog with a really great design and suddenly this is one of my daily websites.
Conclusion: the layout and interaction design of a standard blog has been proven over and over. Stick with it, it’s great.
Btw. Ryan, love the redesign!