Halloween Joomla Template – The Making Of
View the Halloween Template Demo
Our Free Halloween Joomla Template is live and the official template page can be found at the previous link. There you will find links to download, source files, documentation of module positions, etc.
The demo site was designed around the idea of a simple Halloween costumes store. I didn’t really get time to flesh out the store with sample products so I hope you will just appreciate the overall aesthetic of the design 
and then put it to good use in your own projects.
Below is an image of my finished artwork in Adobe Fireworks – everything is on layers so elements can be switched out, edited, etc.
An example of how useful this can be is a quick hue/saturation filter I applied to the background layer, which gives us a really nice alternative effect:
The source files for this project are available to premium Joomlabear members in our downloads area.
I wanted to talk briefly about how I created the artwork and give credit where credit is due.
I’m very proud of the moon – this was created by cutting out an actual photo of a moon and then sitting it over the top of an orange gradient – I then changed the blend mode to Freeze to give a very orange Halloween look.
The font which I used for the logo, and which looks like dripping blood, or something right out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is called Creepsville. It’s free for any use so you can grab this and make your own logos, etc.
The background was created using Photoshop, I took an image that had a large amount of the night blue color in the template, and ran a Gaussian blur over it. I then used a number of excellent free photoshop cloud brushes from Qbrushes, and set them to black – overlaying these over my blue background.
The various Halloween icons, such as the Jack-O-Lantern, spider, cat, crow, bats and witch (you did spot the witch didn’t you?) were taken from an excellent Halloween Photoshop brush set from Obsidian Dawn. Love your work guys.
Hope you all enjoy the template! Leave a comment and let me know if you found this useful, and what projects you are using the template on.
New Notebook Style Joomla Template
Hi All,
We’ve been very busy working on a number of updates to joomlabear.com, and among the good things coming are two new templates.
The first one will be uploaded as a beta later today for members (I will still be tweaking and improving it for a little while).
It’s a notebook style joomla template with a torn edge look, simple and to the point with nice typography.
I’ve created a dedicated demo site for the template and picked a theme of healthy eating recipes as a starting point. I like doing this because starting with a theme for the site makes it a lot easier to find design inspiration for the overall look and feel. The idea is that the template is flexible and you can use the notebook base with any site theme – just use a different feature image( top left) and your own background image.
The demo site is adsense optimized, and you should see good click through rates using this layout with your own projects.
I plan on releasing a number of themes for the notebook look – the first one is good for cooking, restaurant or and food themed Joomla site.
New Joomla Templates Site Live Now – Give Me Feedback
Joomla Templates
This will be a short post as I’m absolutely knackered.
After literally months of work in-between client projects, and probably 160 hours of work I have finally made the new Joomla Bear Joomla Templates site live.
I still have some bugs to iron out and a few things that could do with a bit of a tidy up – but overall I think it’s one of the most interesting and creative sites I’ve ever built.
A bit of a run down on my process and plugins/extensions used will follow in the next few days.
Also the template I built for the new Joomla Template portal lays the groundwork for the next template release 
something for the punters to look forward to.
Leave me your thoughts on the website.
Cheers
