Category for WordPress

Another happy day at ColorLabs. We just launched Equilibria, our first multi-purpose WordPress theme, which is mainly targeted to business users who put their corporate blogs at the frontline of their businesses. It comes with 5 different color schemes, 3 types of landing pages, a pack of page templates and more features are coming. You can read several posts written by members of ColorLabs team, here and here.

Here’s a screenshot of the theme and you can read more about it here and see the live demo here.

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What’s in the name?

From this point below, I will be going to bore you to death but let me try so I know how bad it would be. If you’re looking to know more about the features of this theme. Please read this post instead. If you’re willing to read a bit about chemistry and science stuff, you may proceed.

Equilibria (or equilibrium) is the condition of a system in which competing influences are balanced. Equilibria comes with several types of landing pages (business, blog and portfolio) to balance all sources of influences a website might have, hence the name. I could have come with any name, you know, but again I always find it exciting to take names from my parallel world and use them for names of WordPress themes.

I believe you studied chemistry some years back? In a chemical reaction, chemical equilibrium is the state in which the concentrations of the reactants and products have not yet changed with time. Usually, this state results when the forward reaction proceeds at the same rate as the reverse reaction. Interesting, huh? In a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, there are no net flows of matter or of energy, no phase changes, and no unbalanced potentials (or driving forces), within the system.

I know you’re all confused, puzzled and bewildered but bear with me. I’m going to give you one simple, real-life example. Have you ever seen water boiling? It’s a perfect example of a system (water) that attempts to reach equilibrium. A certain amount of water (in the liquid phase) are turning into vapour while a certain amount of water vapour are also turning into liquid. The controlling factor is simply the heat that we’re adding to the system. If it could be maintained at a constant level, the phase changes would happen at a same rate and the system would be in a perfect equilibrium. This is called VLE (vapour-liquid equilibrium).

How to purchase the theme?

If you like the feel of it or simply want to cherish the engineering philosophy behind the name and want to have it on your blog, simply go to Equilibria‘s page at ColorLabs or click the buttons below and they’ll take you there. Currently ColorLabs has a 30% off offer for all themes so now is the right time to have this theme. The code is EA628 and will be valid until 24 July.

Purchase nowLive demo

Arthemia Premium has been around ColorLabs for a while now, rocking the top players of magazine style premium WordPress theme, and it’s only grown and become bigger and bigger. We have continually updated it to fix bugs and make it work with the latest WordPress versions, as we do with all our themes.

Along the road we have been receiving popular response from users of Arthemia Premium, that they love to have more white space in their beloved theme. So, one day we wondered, why don’t we provide an additional skin for Arthemia Premium so our premium users get to choose?

Say hello to Blue Accent – a clean additional skin for Arthemia Premium. Read More →

ColorLabs launched a new premium theme last month but we’re so busy that we didn’t have the time to blog about this. The good thing is that Anita Pravitasari, the new ColorLabs community manager (her title sounds so cool in this geeky world of WordPress business, to be honest) came to the rescue and finally blogged about that. You can read her post here. She’ll be busy managing the ColorLabs community from now on, so thank God that’s one check-mark off my daily routines. Also, don’t forget to check out the profiles of Firman Firdaus and Rio Purnomo, our new web designer and web developer. Pretty kicking, huh?

Let’s stand out

Wireline has this shiny, oh-so-, modern look and is packed with cool animations like featured posts slideshow, scrollable popular posts and jQuery-powered drop-down navigation menu. There are 5 color schemes available so it’s just so unlikely that your favourite colour isn’t there. And if you’re into the geeky side of web development, it might worth telling that ColorLabs incorporate some HTML5 and CSS3 stuff into it.

Have a look at this top-to-middle screenshot of Wireline, this one is the brown one:

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Wireline comes with 5 alternative color schemes: red, green, blue, brown and black. Read up on the specs of the theme, view the demo and then give us a little feedback love. If you want to get more technical details on the theme itself, please head to ColorLabs‘ website because what you’re about to read below might not interest you at all.

What kind of name is Wireline?

So here’s the thing about being both an engineer and a web developer: you get to pick odd-sounding names taken from your parallel world. I named one of my themes ‘Platformate‘ back. Platformate stands for platinum reformate. In plain English, platinum reforming is the re-arrangement of some sort of chemical compounds, which in this case are the carbon chains in crude oil, using some sort of accelerator, which in this case is platinum. Reformate is the product of the process. Confused? Okay, try this one: it’s LIKE (note that) turning Premium into Pertamax so Pertamina can get more money. That’s NOT exactly the case (hence the capitalised LIKE) but hopefully you get the idea. It’s one of the cool chemical engineering stuff.

What about Wireline? In case you don’t know, the oil and gas industry is pretty dodgy. If there had to be the most superstitious and prophetic engineering on earth, that’d be petroleum engineering. Let me tell you something: A one-pixel discprepancy on a visual design can actually irritate my eyes and the creative side of my brain could instantaneously combust. In petroleum engineering, I’d have to be satisfied with 30% of uncertainties in my engineering estimation. If we’re talking about a 960-pixel wide web site, that error is equivalent to 288 pixels, about the size of a sidebar.

Wireline is a cabling technology where a current is sent to downhole logging tools in oil well exploration and completions. Petroleum engineers send logging tools into oil wells so they get to understand the characteristic of the sedimentology underneath in order to ‘guesstimate’ everything. This practice, and in fact it’s pretty cool, is called Wireline. In simple terms, engineers send a line of wire into the well, hence Wireline.

How to purchase this theme?

If you like the feel of it or simply want to cherish the engineering philosophy behind the name and want to have it on your blog, simply go to Wireline‘s page at ColorLabs or click the buttons below and they’ll take you there. Currently ColorLabs has a 30% off offer for all themes so now is the right time to have this theme. The code is EA628 and will be valid until 24 July.

Purchase nowLive demo

After having been more than 2 years in business, ColorLabs finally gets its second facelift. The site is now fairly simpler and shows a lot of whitespace which makes reading much more enjoyable. It is also in so many ways more integrated so users will find it easier to explore.

First-Time Installation Service

Okay, this is something that is completely new at ColorLabs and we bet you’re going to love this. Each purchase now includes a free, optional first-time installation and configuration service and we promise to make your web site ready in 24 hours. Not only is this so great and helpful for you all, this also cuts the number of technical issues raised in our support systems, which in turn will let us focus more on designing new products for you. To opt-in, you need to submit a request to the Resolution Center and we’ll get down to business in a snap.

Support Systems

We also have just upgraded our support systems. We now have the Resolution Center, a member-restricted area where you can get one-to-one assistance from our dedicated support agents. This system is very secure and you can safely provide us with your WordPress and FTP accounts details if need be. This simplifies matters significantly and you will get your technical issues resolved more quickly.

Additionally, we will have the Discussion Forum, another member-restricted area where you can interact with other members and share your experience using our products. Here, you can find awesome mods that somebody else has done to our themes and discuss how to get them. We will closely monitor this forum as sometimes users raise technical issues which should have been posted to the Resolution Center. This forum is not yet online and we will tell you more about this after. At the moment you will still get forwarded to the current User Forum.

Theme Licensing

All our products are now licensed under GNU General Public License. We simply want to comply with WordPress, the publishing platform that we love so much, and we hope this change will benefit you in so many ways.

What next?

We are still cooking so many things here at ColorLabs. We are trying to focus more on publishing tutorials for you and providing a better customer service. We also have some cool themes waiting to be released and we bet they simply can’t wait to see you. And last thing, we are now recruiting. If you have a passion for design, do drop us a line. You might be the one we have been looking for.

Follow us on Twitter! (@colorlabs)

Hereby is a blog post by ColorlabsProject. We are hosting a WordPress Theme Concept Design competition and we’re waiting for your awesome entries! Anyway, what do you believe in designs? We believe that great designs are designs that speak and function. They were developed through insightful inspirations and born to convey an important message to the viewers. Although designs are always eye-candies, we do believe that awesomeness lies beyond.

Talking about WordPress, what do you think an awesome high quality WordPress themes should look like? Should they have vivid colors? Clear typography? Great content readability? Or perhaps something that conventional graphic design theories forget?

Well, we guess this is your time to decide. Express your insights by designing a theme concept for us. Show yourself off, gain some recognition, and not to mention, there is a total prize of US$ 3500 available for you, talented designers.

How to participate in the contest?

To participate in the contest, you must submit a theme concept to ColorLabs Project. It’s not a theme, it’s just a concept. Here are some technical requirements of the concept:

• The theme concept is intended for WordPress. That’s rule number one. But the great news is: there is a broad possibility of amazing stuffs we can create with WordPress.
• We believe that there are numerous ways to present a theme concept, but to participate in the contest, your theme concept must be created in Photoshop format.
• The theme concept must cater the 1024 X 768 user’s screen. Therefore, considering the margin and borders, the maximum width of the design is 980 pixels.
• To participate in the contest, you need to publish a blog post and tell a bit of your story about the contest. You should also give a linkback to this post.
• Designs must be submitted in JPG or PNG format to contest [at] colorlabsproject [dot] com. You also have to tell us the background story of the concept: what inspired you, how you designed, what the design is all about. Designs are not only about shapes, colors, or patterns. They should have insightful story that complete the whole as one. In the story, please also mention your full name and any URL you would like to be linked to if you win.
• If you use any stock/source images in the designs, please submit them as well and mention the URLs in the story above. Please make sure that those images have extended usage licenses that allow the distribution of the design.
• Designs must be submitted before 14th February, midnight (GMT+7).

The competition is divided into two phases:

1. Qualification Round: January 10 - February 14.
   In this round, participants are only required to submit the front-page of the theme concept in PNG/JPG format. In the end, there will be 12 theme concepts that will be selected to compete in the final round.
2. Final Round: February 14 - February 21.
   In this round, finalists are required to submit the inner pages of the theme concept along with the source files (PSD files). Source files will be assessed to determine the core quality of the design.

The contest is divided into 3 (three) categories:

1. Category A: General Blog/Lifestream and Photo/Videoblog
   Theme concepts participating in this category should include general elements for standard personal/lifestream blogs or photo/videoblogs.
2. Category B: Business Blog/Portfolio
   Designs competing in this category should include several basic elements of business/portfolio blogs. They should be able to market products/services or function as a showcase site.
3. Category C: Newspaper/Magazine
   Theme concepts participating in this category should include main elements of an online newspaper/magazine, particularly: headline, featured posts, multiple post listings, and ad spots.

The winner from each category will receive US$ 1000 and additional US$ 500 will be awarded to the best of the three. So it’ll be US$ 1500 for the best of the best and US$ 1000 each for the rest two winners. All winners will be interviewed and featured in ColorLabsProject. One contestant may submit more than one design and he/she may win more than one category as well.

Designs are assessed by a special team from ColorLabs Project. Three main factors that we will put into considerations are (1) the background story of the concept, (2) how well the theme concept presents the site’s content to the viewer, and (3) how far it transforms WordPress into something stunning yet well-functioning as a website.

We will then make the winning theme concepts available as official ColorLabs Project themes and we will credit the contestant for the design.

Terms and Conditions

• One contestant may submit more than one theme concept, he/she is also able to win more than one category.
• Theme concept has to be completely new, never been published anywhere, and never been used to compete in similar contests.
• Theme concept must be originally developed by you and it must be entirely your own work. If it contains any stock images, it must be certified that they have an extended usage.
• You understand that by participating in this contest, your theme concept is possibly used by ColorLabs Project and may be made available for purchase on our site. Winners will be awarded a cash prize for their work. Any other theme concept will only be made available for purchase after a once-off fee agreed by both parties. Sales generated off the theme will be kept by the company.