As a designer, I’ve become quite the student of typography. I also tend to go through phases when I’ll find myself returning to the same font for project after project. Right now, there are a couple I tend to favor, but I just purchased a new font with which I am itching to experiment: Kurry. (aff)

This font was designed by Bangkok-based type foundry Cadson Demak. At its core, it’s a simple sans serif. But the curvy, quirky details really make it stand out. It features straight lines that end in sweeping strokes and beautiful ligatures that connect characters for a truly unique look. The OpenType font includes dozens of alternates, including keywords such as WITH, OF and BY.

My mind is swimming with the possibilities. This would make a beautiful base for an identity system, and, lucky for me, it is also available as a web font via MyFonts.com. (aff)

If you’re anything like me, and you’ve been using the Thesis theme for WordPress for a while, you’re probably eager for the release of Thesis 2.0 and all the life-shattering improvements it will bring. Ok. Maybe not life-shattering. But if I know anything at all about Chris Pearson and the DIY Themes team, I know those upcoming improvements will be ahead of the WordPress development curve.

For now, go ahead and update your Thesis-based website to 1.8.4 to take advantage of a few new changes:

• Better support for WordPress multisite
• Better performance in the Thesis custom file editor
• Overall bug fixes based on requests and feedback from the Thesis community
• The release of child theme and skin starter templates for designers and developers

You can read about the most recent changes at the DIY Themes blog.

One item of note is the fact that DIY Themes plans to discontinue support for the Thesis-based navigation menu in 2.0.

This is probably relevant only to those who are still using much earlier versions of Thesis, as most users switched to the much easier to manage WordPress menu system when support for it was added a few versions ago. Honestly though, the built-in WordPress menu management options are much more robust than the Thesis nav system ever was, so if you haven’t already switched, now would be a good time to do that.

Disclosure: Hibiscus Creative is an official Thesis designer, and we work almost exclusively with it. All links to Thesis above are affiliate links.

Welcome to the brand new Hibiscus Creative site. The last few months have been incredibly busy, filled with challenging and rewarding projects. As a result, it’s rare that I find time to update the portfolio, or do any in-house work at all. I’ve been meaning to redesign the site for a while, to add some functionality. Once I got started, I decided to go all the way in and start basically from scratch.

So the site has gone from this…

..to this

Not that there was anything wrong with the original design. In fact, I was pretty much in love with it. It’s just that several years have gone by since I initially built the site, and Hibiscus Creative had outgrown it. Not the design, but the site functionality. Plus, I really wanted to start with fresh code rather than try to undo things I had done before.

The biggest changes:

• Pages have been condensed and rewritten to include only the most important information and reduce the need to click through multiple pages
• A custom post type allows us to separate portfolio entries from blog posts
• Directly related to this ^^, is what you’re reading right now, the new blog!

I spend a lot of time reading about design, learning new skills, and bookmarking inspiration. I also seem find myself explaining the same things to clients over and over again. Instead, I’ll start cataloging some of that here in hopes of answering questions about design, offering inspiration, and allowing me to clear my brain of some of the jumbled thoughts that frequently live there.

I can’t promise this will happen on a daily, or even weekly, basis, since the actual work of designing is still what pays the bills around here. But I’ll do my best to share with you regularly in this space.

So take a moment, look at what I’ve added to the portfolio — now known as “our work” in the navigation menu — read about the design process, and ponder our services.

Let me know of you have any questions in the comments section below, or contact Hibiscus now to get a quote for your project.