Kalanit Design Studio

New Catalyst Dynamic Skins

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:22:35 +0000

I am really happy to release my first two Dynamic Skins for Catalyst. They are both free for owners of the Catalyst Theme / Framework and available for download in the Catalyst Marketplace. Of course, if you are a client of mine, you will have access to any of my Dynamic Skins.

I’ve recently been re inspired by the beauty of typography and the simplicity of minimalist design. Lots of white space and carefully crafted typography makes for beautiful websites that allow your content to take front and center.

Meet Type + and Type Base.

Type +

Form. Function. Beauty. This is the the goal with Type +. A minimalist design that allows typography and spacing to take front and center.

The skin is designed for a small site and uses a wide left sidebar. It would work well for editors, writers, and all those who appreciate the beauty of type and the power of our words.

To see a live demo of Type +, just click HERE.

Type Base

Type Base is also a minimalist site that highlights typography and spacing, but it’s also an entirely white and black site. No other colors used.

It’s clean and bold at the same time and would be a great skin for writers, editorial agencies, even a small magazine type site.

To see a live demo of Type Base, just click HERE.

Love, Girl Friday

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:11:30 +0000

What fun working on this project! Love, Girl Friday is a full lifestyle blog dedicated to cappuccino, life-changing shoes, and the latest product to make your skin glowy.

Mystery writer Love Girl Friday — a foodie and lover of beauty wherever it is found — aims to bring you reviews and news about enjoying life. Restaurants, clothes, beautiful little out of the way places, shoes, and more…

The site design is minimalist, whimsical, fun, and clean with lots of white space to give your brain a break and enjoy the simplicity of reading about where to find that great cappuccino / restaurant / perfect get away spot…

A winner all around.

When Girl Friday could no longer keep her style ruminations bottled up inside, Kalanit Design Studio was the first call she made. In no time a blog made of clean lines, easy navigation, and lots and lots of fabulous was up and running. Girl Friday knows where to find a killer espresso, but maybe not the perfect WordPress gadget. Cue Yael, who took care of it all, including some Oscar-worthy technical explanations. So, if you need to get a (cyber) life. And who among us doesn’t? Know Kalanit Design is your one stop shopping for beautiful web creations, just don’t forget to tell her Love, Girl Friday sent you

Visit Love Girl Friday

Sondra Rose: Pregnancy Coaching for Conscious Parents

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:01:52 +0000

Sondra Rose is a gifted coach and healing facilitator who is passionate about pregnancy and bringing forth new things into the world. She specializes in working with pregnant moms to help them clear their fears and their own birth trauma to create the space for a more peaceful and easier pregnancy and birth.

Interesting that our work together in creating her new website very much resembled a birthing process as well. We moved forward, stopped to breath, changed courses a few times, breathed again, and just allowed the design process to unfold in a very natural and organic way. At one point, I simply provided Sondra with the tools she needed to create the look and feel she wanted for her site. Once she had brought this forth, I then created the desired design in the Catalyst framework.

The end result — a warm, inviting, and clean layout that conveys Sondra’s warm and inviting spirit!

Visit Sondra Rose’s site.

Yael supported me in creating the most beautiful website! Her patience and willingness to accommodate my particular way of working made the whole experience a pleasure. She is so speedy in responding–I was delighted to see how quickly I could get my site up & running. I wholeheartedly recommend her to anyone who wants a website that truly reflects their uniqueness. ~ Sondra Rose

Desserts Required

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:53:53 +0000

Betsy Cohen is an unbelievable dessert chef! And she’s also a wonderful communicator and great photographer. Add all these together and you have an awesome dessert blog.

It was such a joy working with Betsy to design her site and to see her begin to share her dessert gifts and knowledge with others.

I used WordPress for the engine / content management system and the Catalyst Framework to create her site design and page layouts. Besty is now blogging regularly and needing no assistance from me! That makes me happy, both the blogging and that she learned what she needed from me and is now independent.

WARNING: Visit site only if you have a strong will power or a decadent desire to indulge yourself!

Desserts Required

Beth Anne Productions

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 05:20:02 +0000

Beth Anne Productions is a music studio in Magnolia, Arkansas. Owner Beth Anne Rankin teaches piano, flute, and voice. She wanted and elegant layout that would highlight her work and reflect her own personal work ethic and musical gifts. Deep burgundy as the base color just came naturally, as it represents the deep and rich qualities that Beth Anne brings to her life and work.

Visit Beth Anne Productions

Women’s High Tech Coalition

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 06:34:18 +0000

Women’s High Tech Coalition brings together professional women in high tech with policy makers in Washington, DC. to facilitate the exchange of ideas among leaders in the public and private sectors. As such, they needed an attractive site that would grow with them as their organization grows. They are also a membership based organization and needed to automate the management of their membership list.

So, we used WordPress + Catalyst Theme + YourMember plugin to create a beautiful, highly functional, membership site.

WordPress is a powerful blog/content management system, but Catalyst gives you the ability to create awesome page layouts and themes for your site. And the YourMember plugin both automates membership and payments and allows you to create restricted site content for members only.

Visit Women’s High Tech Coalition

Personal Ponies

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 13:33:07 +0000

Personal Ponies believe in magic, and I do too after working on this project.

Personal Ponies offer children that are specially challenged the life use of a small Shetland pony to love and care for. There is no fee for leasing their ponies and there are no charges for any of the services they provide.

Despite the national scope of the Personal Ponies program and the many people who help, no one is paid a single penny. Not one penny goes for salaries nor care for ponies because taking full responsibility for the ponies they are assigned, is part of what their volunteers do. Their administrative costs are only a tiny fraction of their annual budget and virtually all contributions go to the real work of expanding the program by helping their volunteers and by importing breeding stock from the United Kingdom.

This foundation of unconditional giving permeates the organization, as you will see if you spend any time on their site. The stories of the ponies and the children are deeply moving and inspiring.

This is a fairly large site (over 70 pages) powered by WordPress. For the design, I customized a theme from WooThemes and created a bright, clean, and professional layout. Most of the site pages use a single column layout so that we could include large pictures of the ponies and the children. And these pictures really do tell a beautiful story.

Visit Personal Ponies

Reinhardt Realty

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 07:04:28 +0000

Who said real estates have to be ugly? Seriously, most real estate sites are not very attractive. They are generally built only for functionality — how to search and find properties — but with little concern for design.

I wanted Reinhardt Realty to have a sophisticated and beautiful design that included all the needed functionality for a real estate site. So I chose (obviously) WordPress for the engine of the site, customized a commercial WordPress theme, and added a few free WordPress real estate plugins to create a beautiful and functional site.

And all for much less than what many people spend on a simply static 5 page website.

That’s the beauty and power of open source solutions like WordPress!

As Vicki’s listings grow, her website will grow as well. When needed, I will install a fully functional real estate plugin and keep the beautiful design.

Who says you can’t have it all? You can have both beauty and functionality when you combine the right ingredients: WordPress + Plugins + Commercial Themes.

View Reinhardt Realty

Notes on Yoga

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 14:06:07 +0000

Notes on Yoga is a site I did for myself to share my yoga journey with other yoga practitioners. This site design is intended to allow easy sharing of quotes, pictures, audio and video files, as well as regular blog posts called “Notes.” I’m an avid reader and love to share nuggets of wisdom and inspiration when I find them, so this format allows me to do just that.

This is purely a blog — unlike most of the sites I design that are more traditional websites that include a blog — so new blog posts appear on the home page.

I wanted a design that really highlighted the blog posts — the content and the images — so I chose a dark, almost black page background with white content areas. I think the contrast works well and draws the reader immediately into the blog posts and site content.

View Notes on Yoga

Slow Blog

Yael Reinhardt-Matsliah — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 15:01:41 +0000

I first read about the concept of Slow Blogging on Matt Caufield’s The Slow Movement website, and I immediately resonated with the idea. I’ve had this vague uneasiness with the blogosphere for a while, but I couldn’t really identify what it was that bothered me. But when I read Matt Caufield and Todd Siesling’s Slow Blogging Manifestos, I understood. Perhaps my own insecurities obscured my view, but their manifestos gave me the confidence to stand up and say, “Yes, this is how I want to approach blogging.”

Our writing is an extension of ourselves, and it represents us in absentia. Writing well is an acquired skill that takes time and practice. Although it may get easier, it always requires thought and careful observation. Free flow writing has value for perhaps helping us access different parts of ourselves, or to generate ideas and creativity, but to then take that knowledge or wisdom and craft it into a well written essay, takes dedicated skill and reflection.

In honor of that dedicated skill and reflection, I offer my own Slow Blogging Manifesto, which is a work in progress.

A Slow Blog Manifesto

1. Slow blogging chooses quality over quantity, rejecting the notion that more is better.

2. Slow blogging respects silence, seeing it not as a void but as a sacred space.

3. Slow blogging values thoughtful analysis and review, rejecting the notion that complicated issues can be expressed or communicated in 5 minute sound bites.

4. Slow bloggers know that while a picture is worth a thousand words, pictures can also be used to create great distortion. Events must be viewed in context and that requires thoughtful analysis and review.

5. Slow bloggers cultivate stillness and space in a very busy and noisy world.

6. Slow bloggers write with an awareness that what we say matters, and that our words can have a far greater impact than we can imagine.

7. Slow blogging aspires to create value in our lives and in our world, rejecting the notion that blogging is simply for increasing revenue.

To read what others have written about slow blogging, see these links:

Matt Caufield

Todd Riesling

A Slow Blog

NY Times: Blogging at a Snails Pace