Back in April I decided to take a well-earned break from work. During that week, I got a lot accomplished. Mostly I worked on my software project (details to be revealed fairly soon, probably) but towards the end I started my first decorating project in my flat.

I wanted to do something a little different, and make the room look a little larger. I think when I was ill one time, with only daytime TV for entertainment, I caught one of those ’sell your house for more’ type programs. One thing they did when making the property into a showhome was add a touch of wallpaper, but not directly to the wall. Instead, a large sheet of thin MDF was covered in a short space of time, and the panel was then propped against the wall. Such a simple idea, but I’d never thought of it before.

So, I’ve taken that idea and built on it a bit. As you can see from the gallery below, I’ve done something on a bit of a larger scale, with the idea of it being a bit more permenant and interesting. I purchased a single roll of fancy wallpaper from wallpapers direct, built a wooden support frame, primed it, lined it, stripped the aforementioned lining from it (lining caused more problems than it solved), and finally covered it with some help from my wallpapering-veteran father.

The larger frame wasn’t just to make it more sturdy and more of a feature; it was key to creating a lighting feature. After much deliberation over the best and most cost-effective way to illuminate, I chose a rope light as the source of the backlighting effect. Lighting efficiency was optimised through a late decision to line it with plain ol’ kitchen foil.

As for the rest of the decoration (and the choice of wallpaper) I took cues from my existing bed set. The pallete ended up consisting of a range of blues, white, chrome and black. The key to putting them all together is varying levels of contrast. The eye is drawn to areas of high contrast, which not only allows you to highlight features but also can be used to provide a greater feeling of space by drawing the eye around the room in a particular manner. I’m just making this stuff up BTW, but it’s what I’ve based my decorating on and it appears to have worked pretty well

Being on a bit of a budget, the accessories had to come cheap. It’s possible to get away with this by sticking to a small pallette and taking advantage of contrast to make things look better than they really are. Anyway, enough writing. I was going to write a much more structured essay, but I’ll let the photos do the talking.

My first WordPress theme, KillerLight, has been released on wordpress.org. The theme is a slightly altered version of the one used on here.

Like this site, it has a javascript-based animated header which fades slowly for a lovely faux-lighting effect. All current WordPress features are supported, including widgets and gravatars.

One important thing to note about the theme is that IE 6 is not supported – it’s just not worth the effort. Instead, a message is displayed to users of IE < 7 informing them that they should either upgrade or get a different browser.

• There is now a JavaScript-driven header animation, which has the ability to detect a slow computer and disable itself. You can turn it on and off manually with the button at the top-right.
• A few more icons have been added here and there
• The ‘read more’ link is now styled
• The footer can expand vertically instead of being fixed height

I’ve taken a look at it in IE6, and it’s not as badly broken as I feared. At the moment the animated header screws things up royally, and the top horizontal navigation doesn’t display horizontally. I hope to at least get things looking reasonably presentable soon, by disabling the animated header for IE6 and changing the way the top nav is styled.

As for a future release of the theme, it’s all planned out in my head. A non-branded version of the header images will be included, so anyone can have that fading animation. The name of the blog will be overlayed in standard text.

I also have a few ideas for spin-off themes, which are a slightly different take (new graphics) on the same structure. Watch this space!

It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally produced my own design for this site.

KillerLight is based on the theme of ‘illumination’. I wanted it to give the impression that things have been illuminated by artificial means, and I looked to a few existing WordPress themes for an idea of what needed doing.

It’s taken about 3 days to put together, just in time for the new year. It was created using a mix of Photoshop, Eclipse (with PHPEclipse) and Notepad++ (for CSS editing). This is my first WordPress theme, and the first serious bit of web design I’ve done in a while.

I also did a little bit in Flash, attempting to have the header rainbow stuff animated and fading between different colours, but there were too many issues so I’ve put that idea on hold for the moment. You can view my attempt if you like by sticking the querystring ‘?animate=true’ on the end of the URL. I know that it doesn’t work in FF on Ubuntu, probably because the Flash player implementation for Linux is a little different.

I don’t have IE 6 at home, so I’ve not been able to test in that. However I assume it will be quite broken, so for anyone unfortunate enough to still be using < IE 7, they will be warned that things won’t look nice and be advised to upgrade or get a different browser. Seems to work fine in FF 3 and Safari (Windows) though.

This theme is not by any means perfect, and there’s plenty more work to do on some of the bits that aren’t commonly accessed. With that in mind, if you spot any issues, please report them in the comments of this post.

Due to illness and a very busy period at work, the designs were a little rushed but I think they came out well in the end. It’s an adaptation of an original propaganda poster (if you hadn’t guessed).

Main menu

The main menu summarises the major systems of the house. Clicking on one of the buttons takes you to more controls for that system. The colour of the buttons indicate the overall state of the system – green = OK, yellow = warning, red = error, grey = disabled.

Audio

The audio controls will list the 4 zones, with a drop-down menu next to each button to select the audio source. Clicking the large button switches the zone on or off. Pressing the ‘Use for all’ button copies the settings of the selected zone to all the other zones.

Security

The large buttons display a thumbnail of the live video from the cameras. Clicking on the large button will show the full video feed (resized to fit the iPod’s screen). Cameras can be disabled for privacy.

The first poster:

This design was based around the theme of the main piece of the concert – death’s fiddle striking up.

First design for concert on 1st December:

This one was inspired by the only reasonable artwork I could find for one of the pieces. The original was landscape, so I had to take some liberties with Photoshop and apply it over the top of a photo. While the result was ok, it wasn’t particularly easy to read and was very busy. This design was dropped in favour of the one below.

Second design for concert on 1st December:

Much simpler, going back to the violin cliché. It does the job.

Poster for concert on 6th December:

This one was inspired by a tutorial, although I didnt follow it to the letter. I’m afraid I can’t lay my hands on the link at the moment, but I StumbleUpon’d it, so click that Stumble button a few times and you might find it!