Open Design

The site is much more open with a light colour scheme and more drastic horizontal lines to help keep content clean. The lab desk has been continued full screen which helps to create a real header, also breaking barriers around the content to give the columns more room. If you’re looking for the navigation menu, you will also notice we hid the menu under the pull string, taking advantage of modern smoothing ideas. Overall we removed a lot of the harsh elements and put more emphasis on the post title and meta details. The sidebar offers you many ways to connect with Inspiredology and the various projects we work on. For you grid people — we still have the grid view!

Sticky Post View

My favourite part of the new design is the single post detail page. I really wanted to concentrate on the content and let everything around it be accessible if you wanted it to be. The post detail page introduces a 3 column sticky layout, with the content column scrolling through as the two exterior columns stay put. The main benefits of this is that the two columns only offer information that is at the upmost importance. The share buttons are easy to get to and we decided to use the big 3 for the time being (facebook, twitter, and G+). The author column puts more focus on our writers which are so important to us and the backbone of Inspiredology; this gives them even MORE credit for the hard work they do for us. We have a catalog of over 100 authors on our website, and we continue to gain more, we are so proud to be able to offer diverse content – so we wanted to put the author front and center.

Responsive

The biggest thing that some of you will notice is that the site is now responsive and views much better on your mobile phones and tablets. The sites optimal resolution is 1280×1024, and we made sure it looked good going down to your standard iPhone size. This was a fun experience thinking of how the site would look on multiple resolutions. This was my first project that I had the chance to play with responsive design so there was a lot of challenges, but a great learning experience.

Faster

I know for a long time the site speed has been an issue, one being the previous theme was a little bulking and the code wasn’t efficient. I will take the blame for that, I developed it and at the time I was unaware of some of the ways I could help boost the speed of the site. So this time around, the theme is lighter, less graphics to load and we are going to be working on the site speed in the next month or so after we get some traffic under it’s belt.

Content Upgrade

Since last year we have brought on our new companion, Mike, to help drive out awesome content. He has created his very own post series called For Your Inspiration that posts every Tuesday. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re missing out, he usually posts 5 inspiring videos showcasing some great creative design.

Also in the near future we are going to be posting a Designer Spotlight on Thursdays, we will select the best designers around and show some of their stellar work. The objective is to offer you even more inspirational content everyday of the week!

Thank you to Buzu who was integral to the design of The Lab 4.0. He is a wizard with code and he did a lot of the back-end work. He will also be responsible for making the site faster as well.

We Want to Hear From You!

As usual we want to hear all your thoughts about the new design, good or bad, it’s extremely important to get user feedback.

Birthday Bash Giveaway

As a designer, website themes can do one of two things; offer great inspiration or help eleviate your workload. So we decided that we needed to have an easier way of finding the best themes instead of looking through RSS or Twitter feeds. ThemeFolder focuses on the best website themes without plastering the web with a million “less-than-awesome” themes that the community would shriek at if you decided to use.

We post three times a week and with each post we give you “the low down” as well as the top 3 features of each theme.

With ThemeFolder being a theme showcase, we decided to use a theme ourselves for the site! We chose “Bookcase”, which you can check out at Bookcase WordPress Theme. It was love at first sight; so we made a few alterations and boom—ThemeFolder showcase came to life!

We also need your help! Let us know what WordPress themes you guys love and want to see as part of the site; we’re looking for input on what are the highlights you look for when searching for that perfect theme. Drop us a line in the comments below and give your feedback!

By now we all know there are thousands of galleries out there, but there are only a handful that are the best. I have been a huge fan of the site since the beginning, as well I have been a huge fan of Nick’s stuff. Nick is located less than an hour down the 401 from me, so over the past year or two we have had a chance to meet up and talk over beers.

It wasn’t till last year we started talking about collaborating in some way. BWG has been dormant over the past year or so, so like many of you I asked why – Nick just simply had no time with his new venture Themify – he couldn’t manage everything. I through the idea out there that I could help out.

That brings us today – Nick revamped the design which looks stellar, and now I am the man behind the site screening all the best websites that come through. I can’t be more excited to be helping out.

There are some great new features of the site, Nick has explained them all – Best Web Gallery Revamp on Web Designer Wall.

Be sure to follow me @chadmueller to stay up to date with Inspiredology and BestWebGallery news, you can also follow @nickla. We are also trying to get the @BWG or @BestWebGallery twitter handles so you can get updated via your twitter stream of all things awesome from BWG.

If you have any feedback on the new design, feel free to comment, we have a few cool new ideas that we are working on.

BWG is back.

It’s been a long time coming, but we have now added Mike Puglielli as our lead editor and writer. Mike has shown his great quality of writing through multiple guests posts listed below. Mike brings a great eye for detail, and a no fear attitude for sharing his opinion, his Dribbble post was one of the most talked about post on Inspiredology whether you agreed or disagreed it was a great post to get people sharing their tough opinions about Dribbble’s stand in our industry. Those are the types of posts to expect from Mike.

Mike has been brought on to help with the quality control of Inspiredology and to add a new opinion on the blog. He has loads of great new ideas that he will be sharing in the future, and not only that he is a great dude that will fit perfectly into our team dynamic.

• Guiding users Eye in your Designs Part 1 & 2
• Dribbble’s Effect on the Web Industry
• Post Mobile World Congress 2011

Mike first caught our eye when he released his critique on the Redesign of Inspiredology. His critique was professional and insightful, the points that were made were welcomed, and we welcomed his professional opinion. Since than we have followed Mike, and kept close contact with him as we trust his opinion and we look to him for feedback on creative projects.

It was only 3.5 years ago that I started this blog solo, now with the help from Andrew and Mike we are only looking forward!

You might have noticed already that we have added a new mad scientists to our header – thanks to Mathieu for his great work on the illustration. He comes through for us time and time again, his style is flawless.

Please be sure to welcome Mike to the Inspiredology team, you can follow him on twitter @thejellymon or just comment below. Plus, he will be posting a fun little surprise for you on Wednesday – so be sure to come back and check his first post out as an Inspiredology lab writer.

Connect with Mike – Dribbble  |  Twitter  |  Website

Well, fast forward a few month after launch day, and still no evidence of our “Switch Views” feature, I then thought – I need help, so I called upon Nivo Slider creator Gilbert Pellegrom. He was more then happy to start the project. He initially laid the ground work, for the functionality, and I did the css styles. We had the functionality of switching, and two different views.

When I finally thought we seen the light at the end of the tunnel, there were problems, mainly with pagination, category views, and the browser remembering which option was selected. We weren’t done yet, but Gilbert had to move on to bigger and better things! At this point, I was unable to go in there and finish the feature, I was scared that I would take a few steps back, I’m not a developer by any means.

This brings us to a few months ago, when I posted an unrelated WordPress question on WPQuestions.com. I found a WordPress developer that goes by the name Buzu. He was able to help me with my issue, he fixed the issue quickly and accurately. I thought to myself – I found my WordPress guy, after working on a few other small fixes, he took a look at the “Switch Views” feature. He was able to fix the pagination problem, as well as set up a switch toggle.

That is the story of how it came about, now this feature really isn’t a huge deal in any terms. I actually want it to be a more subtle feature, I think it just adds to the little details of the site.

In the end, it was created because I enjoy looking at a grid of images, less content, more pretty colours, and an easy way to get into the posts.

We want your feedback, it is greatly appreciated?

In the end, we are continuing to look at new small design revisions to make the site a better experience. We are working on optimizing the site to run like a well-oiled machine that it should.

Big Ups to Gilbert Pellegrom and Buzu for making this happen

The days went by, without me thinking of the blog – until I went to bed last night, it came back to me, Happy Birthday Inspiredology. So that’s how we come to The Lab’s 3rd birthday.

The year that was

This year we launched The Lab 3.0, this was a huge project for us, finally we have created a solid website that we can build on in the future. This is the framework that will take us through 10 more birthdays *cross-your-fingers.

A few things that helped make the site better this year – goes without saying, the new design is rad – love the illustration, couldn’t be happier with the aesthetics of the site. We removed the ads, we wanted our content to have more emphasis, and we know how annoying ads can be, so let the content speak for itself. We joined up with Carbon Ads, a great new ad network – we need some help paying the bills. We also are still working on the “Switch Views” feature that we promised a few months ago…. we released the feature a week ago for some midnight testers – and have a few more kinks to work out. Follow us on twitter to stay updated @chadmueller, @andrewdertinger.

Thank you to the guest writers

This year I was overwhelmed with the amount of guest writers we had. We have over 56 guest writers, not sure about you, but I think that is fantastic. We are always looking for new writers, and if you would like to discuss a blog article, please email me at chad[at]projekt19.com or ping me on twitter.

Inspiredology’s Stats to date

• 407 Posts
• 8,558 Approved Comments
• 1,051,315 Visits
• 772,652 Unique Visits
• 1,643,758 Pageviews

Looking Back on The Years

• Inspiredology Turns 2
• Happy Birthday Inspiredology

We need your help

As you already know Inspiredology has been running for 3 years now, we are gaining more and more followers, and our we need to start planning on scaling up. Our site really bogs down every know and then, because of the traffic, as well our site needs to be optimized better. I am not an expert on optimizing sites with minify, and CDN and all that. So we need your help, if you would like to donate your time to optimize the site we would be forever grateful, please send me an email if you are interested chad[at]projekt19.com.

Branding the Lab

We finally fell in love with a brand and a theme for Inspiredology. The past 2 versions featured a lot of paper/grunge textures and polar bears. It never really had a solid brand, this time around we really sat on some ideas until we came up with the Science/Design lab theme. We agreed that our tag line “Design inspiration lab”, really worked and we decided to keep our logo simple and legible.

Illustrating the Lab

I hope we can all agree that our design lab wouldn’t be a lab without the awesome illustration done by fellow Canadian Mathieu Beaulieu. We knew we wanted something to blow people away, and in working with our design lab brand, we were fortunate to work with Mathieu on the illustration. He did an outstanding job recreating Andrew and myself, not only that but he really set the mood and environment of the lab. We will have a post on how he came up with the illustration in the next few weeks, so be sure to subscribe to our feed to stay updated.

Designing the Lab

Everything was designed based on our lab illustration – we decided on a colour scheme and once the illustration was completed – we worked our way down the site. We didn’t want to change the layout from the old site, so we kept the 2 column layout with the sidebar on the right.

We think it’s easier to scan through the posts with updated typography, post details and more obvious buttons. We added a more custom share menu that is located at the top and bottom of the posts. Our author section has more details and hopefully gives more attention to our authors. We currently have 37 authors and we are constantly looking for more.

What’s New

New Menu

We have reorganized our categories to better suit our site topics, we put the category navigation at the very top of the site so it’s super easy to navigate with the Suckerfish on roids menu.

Design Newz

We also partnered with Design Newz to feature more community content in the Design Newz Widget. This sparked the conversation on whether we would offer a community news section this time around. The thought was that it would just be recycled content that is submitted to Design Newz, DesignBump and other aggregation sites.

New Comment Area

The comment area has been redesigned as well, we wanted to have more discussions on Inspiredology so we completely revamped the comments, separating comments from trackbacks, alternating styles, author styles and added a comment sidebar that would display related posts and a twitter feed. Trackbacks are hidden in a show/hide toggle switch. We really hope the comment area is more inviting and that we can have some good discussions.

Experimenting with CSS3

It wouldn’t be a lab if we didn’t experiment with new chemicals, equations, languages. We do suggest viewing Inspiredology in a CSS3 compatible browser to get the full experience. We thought it would be a good time to experiment with CSS3 as we hope the design is here to stay and CSS3 will only be getting more accessible.

Getting Help

With the new design, we wanted to create something really special, and we knew it would be better if we brought more people to help us create the new environment. We made it a part of the project to collaborate with other designers and developers. As you already know Mathieu did our awesome illustration, we also had the privilege to work with Gilbert Pellegrom, and Matt French. Without the help of these 3 talented people, The Lab wouldn’t be what it is today, so please help us thank them.

Why did this take so long?

Some of you might remember us talking about this in December 09. Our original plan was to launch on our second birthday, obviously that didn’t happen.

For a few reasons, I had recently brought Andrew on to help with posting, and daily tasks to help run Inspiredology. Not only that but we started working on a few new projects that we wanted to introduce. One being Projekt19 which we launched a few months ago. With the launch of that site we have been crazy busy with client work, collaborations and of course posting on Inspiredology. Not only that but this time we wanted to really take our time, and figure out the blog and how we wanted to move forward with it.

Inspiredology through the years

Inspiredology is 2.5+ years old and this will be the third design. I designed the first theme in one night, and it was my first wordpress site, as you can tell by my design I was much younger back then, still learning and experimenting. After the first year – I started to treat the blog more seriously, with the second design, it was much more structured, organized had more user friendly posts and ability to read other posts.

With version 3 I feel that we have finally found a brand/theme for our blog. The layout hasn’t changed much from V2, as we are introducing a whole new design, but we didn’t want you to feel lost with the content. Content is king and we didn’t want to mess with the way you read/scan the content.

Looking ahead

We will be adding some awesome new features in the next coming weeks, that didn’t make the initial launch date. We will also be looking for feedback from you on bugs, browser issues, and new ideas you might have.

We would like to thank everyone that has helped Inspiredology be the blog it is today, please help spread the word, tweet, digg, bump,  anything that you can do to help spread the word of our new design would be greatly appreciated.

In the next week or so we will be posting some really good content, and possibly our best giveaway ever, so subscribe to our feed to stay updated.

Post any feedback you have in our comments, we want to hear what you have to think.

What’s the Deal?

Today, we would like to officially announce the launch of our new company and website.

Projekt19 is a very personal project that we have been working on for over a year. We started the idea because we wanted to change the brand of ourselves. We were independent freelance designers branded as Chad Mueller and Andrew Dertinger. It only made sense that if we teamed up and forged our skills under Projekt19 we would offer more value to our customers. Not only that but Projekt19 will also be the home of creative projects and ventures similar to Inspiredology.

Company Goals

Client Work

• Website Design
• Custom Blog Design
• Logo Design and Business Card Design
• Social Media Strategies
• View more services

Creative Projects

This is the exciting part of the company, we will be creating some fun new project collaborations with top notch designers and internet entrepreneurs. We’re very excited about some of the new things on the way, and we hope to include all of you in the process, so stay tuned!

Projekt19 Wallpapers

We have created some simple Projekt19 Wallpapers for you to sexify your desktop, iPhone and the iPad. Download them here.

Help Spread the Word!

• Check us out at: www.projekt19.com
• The Projekt19 Blog: http://projekt19.com/blog/
• Follow Us on Twitter: @projekt19

Thank You

We also want to thank everyone who has helped us get to this launching point for Projekt19. It has been a long time coming and we really appreciate all the support we have received from our online community, friends and family.

Redesign

The Inspiredology redesign was delayed, our original deadline was for March. We have our main illustration elements finished, thanks to Mathieu Beaulieu – you will see his incredible work very soon. We are also working with Matt French on our mock-up and design of the new theme. We are brainstorming on how much we want to change, and what we want to keep on the original site.

This time around we are looking to create a blog that has a good sense of it’s brand, and target market. We hope this design is going to stick it through and help build us a great brand.

Guest Writers

Yet again, I bring up the ongoing request for Guest Writers. Inspiredology is always looking for guest writers – as most blogs, content is king, and we want content. We have had about 25 guest writers in the past, and we are always looking for more. In the future we are looking at giving more exposure to guest writers, we can’t provide monetary values, but we want to give as much exposure to our writers as we can. We are proud of our writers, and we are here to help give everybody a chance to get their name out there.

Advertisers

You may have noticed that our advertising spaces have changed quite a bit over the past few months. We have had a few advertisers drop their spots, and we have been filing them with more event-oriented ads. Like most blogs – advertising helps pay the bills (hosting, maintenance, time) so we are looking at new ways to help advertisers get the most value for their placements.

Events & Networking

My biggest goal for this year was to start attending more events and start networking more. Thanks to Andrew for getting us involved in local events like TwestivalTO, WordCampTO, FITC and hopefully NXNE coming up this summer. The events have given us a chance to meet some great people, and meet some of our readers. So if you know of any events, let us know we would love to help promote it and possible attend the event.

Super Secret Projekt

We have been working on our new company website. It’s our design company site which will showcase our design work, and services. Not only that – but it will be home to all our creative projects like Inspiredology. We are working on collaborations with some great designers and bloggers to put out more fun projects. We will be post more information on this in the near future.

What’s next

This week, we will have our final recap of FITC, and in the next coming weeks, be sure to subscribe to our feed and follow us on twitter chadMueller, dertmobile. We will be posting site updates and posting about our super secret projekts coming up.

*Before you comment that we spelled Projekt wrong (there I go I did it again). In the next week or two you will find out why we spelled it that way. Very exciting time right now – can’t wait to unleash our new projekts to you guys.

Twestival Toronto will join hundreds of cities around the world in using social media for social good. We cordially invite you to an exciting new event on March 25, after raising $16,000 with the help of over 700 Torontonians last year.

Join your community offline to rally behind the important cause of education for @Concern. This is an issue that involves many different elements: hunger, water, teacher training, building of schools, etc. Organized 100% by volunteers, we ensure 100% of all tickets and sponsorships go directly to projects. Tweet. Meet. Give.

The Event is taking place at Tryst Nightclub ( @trystnightclub )

This will be the first local event that Chad and I will have the pleasure of being a part of in the Toronto Social Media scene and we are very excited to become involved in the great community here.

We will both be tweeting from the event so be sure to follow us ( @dertmobile , @chadmueller ) to jump into the conversation!

Not From Toronto? No Problem!

Visit the Concern.org website to see if there is a Twestival event taking place near you, or for more information about the great cause.