In this article we’ll examine the barriers that hinder designing for yourself and reveal 10 rules to help you create the best design for yourself. Together we’ll squash that dark side in all of us.

The struggle within

As depicted in the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the duality of human nature has been a fascinating subject throughout history. Duality is the exploration of good and evil, or in this article, the inner conflict of the creative person. As a designer this struggle within is something that can be a very powerful tool, if you can learn to control it.

Rule #1: Final destination

When you get in your car do you just start driving and hope you get to the right place? No. You would know where you want to go. Same thing goes for your website. Ask yourself what you would like the results to be. Don’t be vague and say “A cool site.” It might be to show clients you think through the user experience. It could be to get recognition on some galleries. Maybe you%

via How to Design for Your Worst Client: You..

In part 1 we learned how to link to a post, and display it’s content within our new post using custom fields and manipulating the single.php file. In this part we are going to learn how to link back to the post using another single.php file. This is quite simple and because we have already setup our WordPress blog with the correct custom fields, the only file we will need to modify is the template file performer-single.php.

1. Requirements

1. WordPress 2.7.1 (not tested in earlier versions)
2. A basic understanding of PHP
3. An understanding of the WordPress codex
4. Read the first part of this tutorial here

2. Modify performer-single.php

Open performer-single.php from within your theme directory. This is the file we created earlier in part 1 of this tutorial.

We need to add the following code to our file in order to link them together. I’ve added my code on line 70, after the <?php endif; ?> line.

First off, let’s add a H2 tag to break up our new content.
<h2>Upcoming Performances from this Artist:</h2>
Rewind posts
<?php rewind_posts(); ?>
Now we need to get the title of the current post
<?php $my_title = single_post_title('', false); ?>
Create a new WordPress query. This queries only posts in the ‘events’ category, with a custom field with a value that matches the current post name, and return 10 results.
<?php $get_performer_events = new WP_Query('category_name=events&post_type=post&meta_value=' . $my_title . '&numberposts=10'); ?>
Start our WordPress loop
<?php while ($get_performer_events->have_posts()) : $get_performer_events->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
Add some content to the loop. This will display the title, the content and the tags for each post that links to the current post.
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Link to: <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php the_tags( '<p>Tags: ', ', ', '</p>'); ?>
<hr />
Now let’s end our loop
<?php endwhile; ?>

View our site for changes

Now let’s save our performer-single.php, and view our site for changes. If we take a look at our performer post, we will see below the content for that post is a list which diplays 10 posts that link to the current post. If we need to remove the post association, all we need to do is edit the event post it is associated to, and remove the post title from the custom field.

Sometimes it is not always appropriate to backlink to the post. In this case we could add a new custom field to the performer post named ‘backlink’ with a value of yes or no. Then put the above code into a conditional statement to decide whether or not to display it, based on the value of the custom field. You can experiment with different possibilities, but this tutorial outlines the general concept and implementation.

If you found this post useful, please leave a comment or you could even digg it!

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Why are we linking posts together?

This technique is great for publishing content. The problem I came across was sometimes in WordPress you need to include content from another post in your new post. I searched the WordPress forums for a solution to this, and this article explains the same problem I had. Their example uses Whiskey malts, and the distillery they came from. The solution featured on their post, however, only displayed custom fields on the post, and you could not call template tags like you would in the loop. I needed to create events, and display all of the performers for the event, as well as venue information, including the_content() and the_tags(). To make the site as dynamic as possible, I decided it would be a good idea to create individual posts for all performers & venues, and pull it all together using an events post.

1. Requirements

1. WordPress 2.7.1 (not tested in earlier versions)
2. A basic understanding of PHP
3. An understanding of the WordPress codex

2. Setup WordPress categories & posts

First we need to add our categories. I added three for my project, but in this example we’ll just use two.
The Categories we’ll use here are:

• Performers
• Events

Now let’s create some sample posts. First we’ll add some performers. I’m adding a post titled ‘Joe Bloggs’, with a biography about the performer in the write panel, and some random custom fields such as performer website and email address. Let’s publish this post in the ‘performers’ category and move onto creating our event post.

The event post should contain a post title (I’m calling mine ‘Gig at the Old Spice Bar’), some content about the event, and published in the events category. We’ll also add some custom fields to this post. Add a new custom field name ‘performer’ and value ‘Joe Bloggs’ (or the post name we want to add content from), and do this for each post we want to display in our event post. It is important to mention here that the value of the custom field must be an exact match to the post name we want to insert content from.

UPDATE! Above it states ‘the value of the custom field must be an exact match to the post name we want to insert content from’. This statement is incorrect. The value of the custom field should be an exact match of the post slug. In my example, where I have inserted Joe Bloggs, the slug is joe-bloggs, so the custom field can read any of these: ‘joe bloggs’, ‘Joe Bloggs’ or ‘joe-bloggs’. However if you change the post slug, you will need to update this custom field as well. Any changes to the post name will not affect this technique.

3. Create new single.php for each category

In this example I am using WordPress default ‘kubrick’ theme. Go to your favourite editor, and duplicate single.php from within your theme folder. Rename this to ‘event-single.php’. Duplicate again but rename this copy to ‘performer-single.php’. Duplicate this a third time and rename to ‘default-single.php’.

Open single.php and replace it’s content with the following:

<?php
if ( in_category('performers')){ include('performer-single.php');
} elseif ( in_category('events')) { include('event-single.php');
} else { include('default-single.php'); }
?>

Now that we have added these files, our posts will be displayed in different template files, depending on what category the post is in.

4. Edit event-single.php

Let’s add some magic to event-single.php to enable us to show some content from the post ‘Joe Bloggs’.

Open event-single.php which we created earlier, and find a suitable place to add the code below. This is where we will display the content from our other posts. I have started my code on line 70, after <?php endif; ?>.
Rewind posts
<?php rewind_posts(); ?>
Get the values of custom field name ‘performer’ and store it as array $performers;
<?php $performers = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'performer', false); ?>

Let’s loop through all of our performers using PHP foreach
<?php foreach($performers as $performer) { ?>

Create a new WordPress query, which queries only posts in ‘performers’ category, and with a post name of that from the custom field and returns only 1 post.
<?php $get_performer = new WP_Query('category_name=performers&post_type=post&name=' . $performer . '&numberposts=1'); ?>

We need this line to be able to use template tags inside our loop such as the_tags();
<?php $wp_query->in_the_loop = true; ?>

Lets start our WordPress loop
<?php while ($get_performer->have_posts()) : $get_performer->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

Now add the content we want to display using template tags
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Link to: <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php the_tags( '<p>Tags: ', ', ', '</p>'); ?>
<hr />

end our WordPress loop
<?php endwhile; ?>

end our performers foreach
<?php } ?>

What we have essentially done in the code above is create a new WP_Query for each of our performers listed in the custom fields.

5. View our site for changes

Now let’s take a look at our WordPress site. If we look at a post in the performers category, nothing has changed. However, if we look at a post in the events category (my post is ‘Gig at the Old Spice Bar’), we should see our performers included in there as well.

In part 2 of this tutorial, I will explain how to add backwards compatibility to your performer post, without adding any more custom fields to WordPress and using only the performer-single.php file. See you there!

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What is the Email Standards Project

The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

Their goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike.

Their blog style website is a great resource for designing an email template right now, giving loads of information on current email client support, email template layouts, plus loads of other stuff to help you along the way.

To read more about the Email Standards Project visit their website at: http://www.email-standards.org/

I was sitting at my desk earlier on today trying to find inspiration for my current project. A lot of the time I already have a picture in my head of where I want to go with a project. But this morning, there was nothing in there. I started looking around my office, and this is when I realised that I wasn’t in the most inspiring of environments.

It’s not that I don’t like where I work, but more so that it’s a little too ordinary. There is nothing to stand out, nothing to inspire, nothing to help create. And when you spend a lot of time at your desk, inspiration and creativity are two things that can sometimes suffer.

I’ve posted a few pictures below of my ‘not so inspiring’ office. If you have any suggestions on how I can improve my workspace, or want to share some pictures of your office, feel free to post a comment below.

My workspace

So, What’s New?

My new website now has many features my previous version didn’t.

Firstly, I have decided to build the website around wordpress. This will make it easier for me to update the site, and release news & tutorials. I have also included a search feature for you to find what you want easily.

My portfolio is now a lot more straight forward, and displays my work clearly. As is my services page, where I have broken my main services down into small sections making it easier to read, and find what you’re looking for.

I have also created a lot more in-depth contact form, which will enable new clients to tell me more about their project. The form is broken down into 4 sections, and has it’s own navigation to move through the form swiftly.

Where did the design come from?

This is a question I cannot answer. I have designed this site several times during my re-branding, and finally got to a design that I liked. I think that over the time of the re-design, I have picked certain elements from each design that I liked, and they have all come together in the site you see today.

Finally, thank you for visiting my site. I hope you like it!