Nova Theme

Nova Premium Tumblr Theme

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:26:00 -0700

Although Nova looks incredible with a fresh install, you have the option to customize the nearly 50 appearance option, choose from the standard two column layout and a HD-wide one column layout, enable infinite scrolling, customize colors, upload background and header images, choose between the dark and light styles, and much more.

Preview the HD Layout & Infinite Scrolling

See an example of Nova 1.1 using the HD layout perfect for 720 pixel wide content. The demo also features the new infinite scrolling option for a continuous feed of posts. Have questions about Nova 1.1, infinite scrolling or the HD layout? Email us at nova@stylehatch.co or send us a message on Twitter - @stylehatch.

Advanced Theme Customization

Using the Appearance color values and image uploads you can create a unique version of Nova for your site. Depending on the style you’re going for you can toggle the dark/light modes for variations in the icons, date blocks, and post backgrounds.

Social Features

Nova supports a variety of 3rd party social features including the Facebook like button, Twitter’s tweet button, short URLs, Disqus comments, your Twitter feed, and more planned in future versions.

Typekit Support

Want ultimate control over the typography in Nova? New to Nova 1.2 is full integration of Typekit in the appearance options. Here are the basic steps involved in setting up Typekit for your site:

Register for a Typekit account - https://typekit.com/plans Typekit offers several affordable yearly accounts, but you can always go with the free plan with access to their trial library.
Browse through the library and click + Add to Kit after you’ve selected the body and title font for your site.
While you have the Typekit Editor open go through the list of Weights & Styles (screenshot) selecting only the fonts that you need. This is typically regular, regular italic, bold and bold italic.
Once you have your two fonts selected hit the green Publish button at the bottom right (screenshot).
Go to back to Tumblr and open Customize > Appearance, find the Typekit ID field and paste in your Typekit ID. You can find the ID by opening the Typekit Editor and clicking Embed Code at the top right. You only want to copy and paste the 7-8 character ID at the bottom (screenshot).
Now paste in the font-family values for the body and title fonts into Customize > Appearance. You will find it by clicking Advanced below theSelectors on the left (screenshot).
Example: “proxima-nova-1”,”proxima-nova-2”,sans-serif

Tip: Even if you don’t use Typekit you can use the Typekit Body Font and Typekit Title Font options to paste in other standard font-family fonts.

Customization Options

Black Style
Toggle the dark/light versions. This controls the date block, post type icons, post and sidebar backgrounds, and overall theme background.

HD Layout
Enables the one-column layout with 720 pixel wide post content. Image posts show high resolution versions of the images, video posts scale the embed to 720p, and audio posts use larger album art. The site title and description go to the top of the page, and liked posts/twitter feed move to the footer.

Use Floating Dates
As you scroll down the page the date blocks will fix to the top of the browser window. Disabling this option will keep the date blocks in place.

Show Blogs I Follow
When enabled a list of the blogs you follow appear in the footer.

Use Custom Fonts
By default this enables the custom font-face type for post titles and UI details.

Use Extended Font Characters
Option to load a larger version of the font-face files to include extended latin character support—Albanian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Faroese, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Malagasy, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Disable Default Background Image
If you want to simply use a solid background color for the theme customization option you will need to check this option.

Show Portrait in Descriptions
Shows a small portrait icon inside your description.

Show Social Links
Show the block of social icon links. See the full list of icon types available below.

Show Group Blog Details
If your site is a group blog checking this option will list the site authors in the sidebar as well as post credits below each post.

Use Toggle to Show Share Bar
Hides the Twitter/Facebook buttons and the short URL field and displays a Share button. When a visitor clicks the Share button it will reveal the share bar.

Enable Infinite Scrolling
Check this option to turn the theme into a continuous feed of posts as you scroll towards the bottom of the page. Currently this feature is only supported in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer 9. If a visitor is using an older version of Internet Explorer they will simple see the non-infinte scrolling version.

Image - Header
Uploader to add a header image to your site. In the standard layout the sidebar header should be 300 pixels wide, and in the HD layout the header image should be 760 pixels wide. Anything wider will scale down to the proper size, but will take longer to download.

Image - Background
Uploader to add a background image to your site. By default the background image is set to tile in the background, but using the Custom CSS field in Customize > Advanced you can change any CSS background attributes.

Color - Accent
Set the color of the post type icons, date type, link hover colors, and Vimeo embed colors.

Color - Link
Set the link colors used throughout the site.

Color - Background
Set the background color if you’re using a solid background color or fading the background image to a solid color.

Custom Text Titles
Set the titles above blocks of site content including: “Pages”, “Find Me On”, “Recent Tweets”, “Posts I Like”, “Flickr Feed”, and “Blogs I Follow”.

Disqus Username
Add your site’s Disqus short-name to include comment functionality.

Google Analytics ID
Add your Google Analytics ID to track site usage, visitors and trends.

Clicky ID
Add your Click ID for realtime visitor tracking and additional analytics.

Flickr ID
Add your Flickr ID to display thumbnails for the six most recent photos. Your Flickr ID is different form your username. To find out your Flickr ID use idGettr.

Sidebar Widget HTML
This option allows you to paste in HTML to create new sidebar boxes for ads, social plugins, or other content.

Social Links
The follow sites listed below have icons associated in the theme that you can enable by entering in a link to your profile:

Behance
Cargo Collective
Delicious
Digg
Dribbble
Ember
Etsy
Facebook
FFFFound
Flickr
Forrst
Gowalla
LastFM
LinkedIn
Skype username URL
Slideshare
Soundcloud
Stumbled Upon
Twitter
Vimeo
YouTube
Email address

Make Nova Your Own Although Nova looks great fresh out of the...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:15:00 -0700

Make Nova Your Own

Although Nova looks great fresh out of the box, give it that extra 5% of love and you’ll have something unique that matches your own style. All you have to do is change up the layout, background, colors, and upload some header images.

Have you made something unique with Nova? Leave a link to your site in the comments and we might show off your site here or on Twitter - @novatheme.

The track Coquet Coquette is on of Montreal’s new EP for...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 05:42:00 -0700

The track Coquet Coquette is on of Montreal’s new EP for their album False Priest coming out on September 14th—pre-order the album. Have a look at their absolutelyinsane music video for Coquet Coquette.

of Montreal managed to mix in pretty much every genre of music on ‘False Priest’. You get a little bit of soul, funk, R&B, pop, rock, and of Montreal (yes, that’s now a genre).

Illustrator Saiman Chow Working with Buck, Saiman Chow created...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:19:00 -0700

Illustrator Saiman Chow

Working with Buck, Saiman Chow created hundreds of illustrations for Nike’s presence at the World Basketball Festival in NYC. The illustrated branding included more than 40 basketball players, pop legends, dozens of sneakers, NYC iconography and additional elements to capture the spirt of the basketball festival.

In addition to the branding Buck also produced, in collaboration with Cypheraudio, this Nike 30 sec TV spot and a number of other eye-candy bits that covered Times Square.

"Creativity is a double-edged sword. The more ideas we have, the less likely we are to stay loyal to..."

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:06:00 -0700

“Creativity is a double-edged sword. The more ideas we have, the less likely we are to stay loyal to one. So the creative mind ends up jumping from idea to idea, and none of them happen. There is no correlation between how great an idea is and the likelihood of it happening.”

- — Scott Belsky

Founder and visionary of Behance and the 99 Percent.

The Art of Momentum: Why Your Ideas Need Speed

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 16:33:00 -0700

The Art of Momentum: Why Your Ideas Need Speed:

Excellent article from 99 Percent on the importance of momentum, carving out consistent time to work on your project, and working on your project every day.

It’s just like Newton’s First Law of Motion: The tendency of a body in motion is to keep moving; the tendency of a body at rest is to sit still. In other words, it’s a lot less work to keep moving once you have some momentum, than it is to start moving from a dead stop.

Personally do you consistently stay in a state momentum or always struggle to build momentum?

How Branding and Transparency Help charity: water Stand...

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 16:48:00 -0700

How Branding and Transparency Help charity: water Stand Out

Scott Harrison from charity: water stopped by the new 37signals office to speak to the team about the unconventional ways that charity: water stands out from other charities through branding and transparency.

Another key to CW’s success is that 100% of donations are used for direct water project costs. (A group of private donors, foundations and sponsors help pay for the everyday costs of running the organization.) CW even pays for the paypal and credit card transaction fees when people donate online so each penny goes straight to actually building a well.

Read the post “How branding and transparency help charity: water stand out” on 37signals - signal vs. noise blog.

Bat for Lashes Visuals Robin and Julia of Treat Studios directed...

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 16:43:00 -0700

Bat for Lashes Visuals

Robin and Julia of Treat Studios directed these visuals for Bat for Lashes (Natasha Khan) early 2010. This is a short edit of around 20 mins of footage produced. The visuals were projected behind her singing with a string quartet, it was ace.

The song is ‘Siren Song’

“Inception” Sound for Film This 6 minute profile of the sound...

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 22:54:00 -0700

“Inception” Sound for Film

This 6 minute profile of the sound production for the movie Inception is beyond fascinating. It’s easy to watch a movie and appreciate the visual production, but the rich sound that makes any movie is easily overlooked. The techniques used for capturing and layering audio for full impact of gun shots and dream-state explosions are incredible.

If you enjoyed this sound profile check out SoundWorks Collection similar profiles for SALT, Toy Story 3, Watchmen, Avatar, Where the Wild Things Are, and many others.

"Innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:22:00 -0700

“Innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.”

- — Dieter Rams

1960s+ German industrial designer that influenced the design of the iPhone 4

No Country for Small Men Photographer Florian Tremp recreated...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:19:00 -0700

No Country for Small Men

Photographer Florian Tremp recreated and photographed a number of scenes from No Country for Old Men using incredibly detailed models and photographic techniques. This series reminds me of Strange Worlds photographs—and making of—that I posted a few months back.

Via Kitsune Noir

Overheard conversation

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:26:00 -0700

Tourist: Could you give us directions to Olive Garden?
New Yorker: No, but I could give you directions to an actual Italian restaurant.
Tourist: I thought Olive Garden was Italian. If it isn't then what is it?
New Yorker: *rolls eyes*