Originally published on arcanepalette.com

Yesterday we released our fifth Museum Theme, Ex Libris.  If you’re reading this today (August 4, 2010), there’s still time to get $10 of the purchase price with the coupon code ‘exlibris’ (no quotes). Ex Libris was designed for typophiles and writers, putting the focus on type and content rather than graphics and bells and whistles.  Everything about the theme was done with readability in mind, from the background color to the font size, but we also added some of our own creative flair to give it a bit of minimalist edginess.  We used fonts from the reputable exljbris font foundry, which also inspired the name of the WordPress theme.  We’re excited about the powerful type controls we’ve added to the options page, allowing users to have full control over […]

I’ve been playing with various photographic effects and grunging them up for the new jazzsequence.com design, particularly the headers and post thumbnails.  So, it was with those techniques at my fingertips and on my mind that I approached these two wood textures from an upcoming texture pack to create this month’s wallpaper.  And since we were having so much fun, we created two wallpapers this month. Each wallpaper comes in calendar, non-calendar, Twitter, iPad and iPhone variations in the following sizes: Widescreen 1920×1200 1680×1050 1440×900 Standard 1600×1200 1280×960 1152×864 iPad 768×1024 iPhone 320×480 Twitter 1920×1200 (optimized to <800k) Download August Deadwood 23.84MB downloaded 653 times Mirror site (customize.org)

This is a texture pack of high-quality images of interesting nature textures.  This set continues where our last one left off, adding dirt, wood, vines and leaves to your arsenal. All our textures are released under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attributio…

The ancient city of Gilmel, bordered on three sides by the great river Nazarel, was lost in the battle of Harper’s Point.  Gilmel — once the thriving cradle of civilization — was fortified on all sides by walls 30 feet high and twice as thick.  Even that, however, could not stop the Samsen army from laying waste to the city.  The siege lasted 3 weeks, and when the walls came tumbling down,  the great stone gargoyles smashed and shattered in the streets, most of the civilians fled up-river to the nearby city of Oreh… The concept behind this month’s wallpaper was a mythical city, ancient, rich with culture and art, remembered in its architecture and ruins.  Anyone who’s been to Europe can appreciate the reverence you feel when looking at […]

It’s almost the Fourth of July.  In addition to barbecues, dry heat, and celebrating our country’s independence from Britain 234 years ago, that means it’s almost time to blow stuff up! Here’s a Blogger template that you can g…

If you’ve been following us on Twitter or Facebook, you will have undoubtedly heard us talking about our new Museum Themes — unique, fine art WordPress themes.  We’ve spent months planning, designing, and coding these babies, and we…

This texture pack is a hodge-podge of random objects and textures that have the common theme that they were all taken from an old house.  Screens, mesh, old fabric, vintage wallpapers and retro-tastic heating vents to add to your collection.  All images were taken at 2272×1704, large enough to do pretty much whatever you want.  If you like these, you should check out our first miscellaneous textures pack. All our textures are released under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Share-Alike license. Click the license badge below for more information about usage. Arcane Palette textures by Arcane Palette Creative Design is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.arcanepalette.com. To download this pack, click the link underneath the previews below. Download APmisc-textures2 […]

BEST | EVER is a street art duo from Bournemouth, England.  Their work combines surrealism with photorealism and addresses issues of human frailty, weakness, disease and death.  As you can imagine, the art of BEST | EVER transcends simple graffiti with their hauntingly beautiful images.  The subversive act of applying paint to public surfaces forces you to consider that some art is too important to be confined to stuffy and claustrophobic gallery spaces. You can see more of BEST | EVER’s work on their website or their Flickr photo stream.  You can learn more about them in this interview or follow their Tumblog.

Okay I admit it.  I have been reading too many steampunk novels recently because this is what spilled out of my subconcious when I sat down to create a new wallpaper.  Clockwork, ancient tomes filled with long lost technology, a mixture of organic a…

Webfonts are literally changing the face of web design (no pun intended). Even just between the time I wrote my last post on @font-face and now, there have been numerous additions to best practices and available services for invoking new, creative typefaces in your web pages.  It’s dizzying getting started because there’s just so much out there and new methods of calling fonts are cropping up all the time.  In this article, I talk about what the web font formats are, where to get them and how to use them. What the options are TrueType/OpenType – I’m not going to go into the difference between TrueType and OpenType in this post.  The two things exist and they are more or less the same and are typically the most common font […]

Doing Only Crooked Shit is a design duo based in Sao Paolo and Leeds,  UK that does visual art, graffiti, design and illustration.  And they’re pretty  much awesome.  I discovered them via their Times New Yorker free font available on DaFont.  Their illustrations and graffiti art explore typography and pop culture in new and interesting […]

We’ve been wanting to talk about art more.  As artists, we’re always interested in new and innovative things that other artists are doing.  Occasionally that applies to websites, but occasionally that applies to, you know, real art — tangible art you can look at and (possibly) touch and smell and experience.  I’m hoping that this […]