• Ground-up creation of a custom WordPress 3.1 template
• Graphic design and layouts
• Hand-crafted PHP for bespoke functionality

It was a lot of fun to put together, not to mention a learning experience in just how to push custom designs in WordPress. I’m pleased with the way the site turned out, and I think we achieved our goal of producing an anime site that doesn’t look like “another WordPress blog”.

Very much looking forwards to refining the design over the coming months – there are plans for individual page layouts and an opportunity for me to do a lot more graphic design.

No rest for the wicked though, moving onto the next project, End Titles, ahead of next months Edinburgh International Film Festival…

This weekend we launch the first version of the magazine over at animepicks.co.uk. Under the hood it’s a regular WordPress setup, but with theme and template files built from the ground up. Because of the rather specific requirements for a magazine look and feel, rather than relying on the WP “loop” most of the content has been stuck together with hand-crafted PHP.

The project has also given me chance to play with all-round branding, from t-shirt design to badges. A lot of fun, and freedom (which is rare!), plus it’s been very interesting trying to get WordPress to do more “fun” layouts.

However, there is a downside to this. As yet, there is no common, more efficient delivery method. Unlike books, which can be purchased and downloaded through either Apples’ iBooks app or Amazons’ Kindle, each magazine packages their own downloader — and those downloads can be huge. There are only so many 500Mb issues of Wired that you can fit even on the largest iPad.

We’re almost there, and this is definitely the device to take us there!

• Cost of the device – iPads are clearly prohibitively expensive for the majority of folks, limiting the market
• Only a handful of truly interactive Magazines, such as Wired
• Delivery format: current crop of interactive magazines are very large in size, filling up a lot of space on the iPad

Let me say this up front: Content Managers are not easy to write!

Thankfully the pain is somewhat mitigated thanks to TinyMCE and a lot of jQuery.

Issue 1 demo cover. Who drew the anime girl?

I have mixed feelings about cover design. April 2010 being our first issue, and we really don’t want BiteSizedJapan.com to be seen as “just another Anime magazine”. After all, that’s not what we’re about. We’re a Japanese Culture magazine, and Japan is far more than Anime, Manga and schoolgirls (no, really!). We will be far broader in our exploration of Japanese culture.

A quick google of “japanese culture” kicks up 100′s of interesting web sites that touch on similar themes to BSJ. While many are packed with interesting information, the majority feel like academic web sites or wikis. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these, but they are hardly inspire or catch the eye. There are obvious exceptions such as the rather excellent www.tokyocube.com or www.pingmag.jp (sadly no longer published). This is the “cool” end of the market, but both of them lack the magazine format that attracts me to working on Bite Sized Japan.

Finding a balance between the “cool” and “academic”, while trying to keep our magazine format*, is challenging. For our premier issue its really important for us to catch the eye of casual surfers, while managing to promote that we’re an information rich publication, rather than just lots of pretty pictures of anime girls and funny things in Japan.

* There is of course one small caveat to all of this: We’re not a printed magazine. Being exclusively online means that pretty welcome pages are a no go: we have to present the guts of our content to our readers (and the lovely GoogleBot) first-hit. Our cover page is unlikely to be the first page a reader will see when they come across our magazine as we’ve actually reversed the order from a traditional print magazine!

So, if you come up with a fab design with sexy typefaces and a wonderful layout… and then you can pretty much kiss that goodbye within a browser. After all, you are limited to a handful of rather dull typefaces, and until now there was very little you could do about that….

The solution? Well, over the past week or so I’ve been playing with the Cufon font library.

Cufon is a very clever tool that lets you upload fonts and reprocess them in a format that can then be displayed in almost all browsers. Simply including the Cufon script:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/script/cufon.js”></script>

…the font script (generated via their web site)…

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/fonts/EurostileT_400-EurostileT_700.font.js”></script>

…and a simple jQuery call and you’re good to go:

Cufon.replace(“.myCssClass”);

Cufon will walk through your page and replace all instances of “.myClass” with your fancy font. It’ll even maintain the formatting (including colour).

We’ve tested this on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, FireFox 3.5 and Safari 4.1 and it works like a charm – and ideal tool for a type-heavy publication like a magazine (BiteSizedJapan).