What a great month; two new themes, three new Fabrik Heroes, better Portfolios and a new way to connect your Fabrik site to your other social and creative accounts.
Themes
May saw the release of our brand new Fabrik site, and the culmination of a lot of work over the winter making Fabrik more powerful, more versatile and easier to use. Patiently waiting behind the core functional updates was Airdura; a brand new theme designed to make the most out of the beautiful imagery our users create with full-width cover images and gorgeous typography options. Suited to creatives with medium-sized portfolios, theme settings include toggles for tags, summaries and titles, share icons and a solid colour header. Airdura currently holds the Fabrik record for the most layout options; boasting over twenty.
Our second new theme, Jute is a distinct theme that features a bottom-aligned menu on the homepage that slides up to create a left-aligned sidebar throughout the rest of your site. Jute includes sixteen layouts and some wonderfully simple customisations to make it as easy as possible to build a perfect portfolio site. Creatives with expansive, beautiful imagery will find great layouts to show off their work to its fullest.
Canvas got a big update this month, and is now completely responsive across mobile and tablet devices. As well as adding some new layouts we took a fresh look at the customisation options too, and made colouring Canvas and changing the fonts a lot easier.
Remember that you can switch themes whenever you like in Fabrik without needing to re-format or re-upload your project media, so make sure you take a look and play with the customisations.
Layouts
If you're new to layouts take a quick look at our Layouts overview tutorial. Put simply, layouts work within our themes to give you options to present your projects and your project media in different ways, working with your project media to make your Fabrik truly unique. Set your global layouts or quickly change individual projects and blog articles as you need to.
This month we introduced a brand new layout option to Airdura and Jute for portrait images. Our Strip layout formats all media in your project horizontally in one row, using the full height of your browser. Media slides from right to left as your viewers navigate through your project media with the next button, focusing on one image at a time. Strip is a great layout choice for photographic projects that have media with varied aspect ratios or projects primarily comprised of portrait or square images.
See Strip in action on our Jute Live Preview.
Portfolios
Some of our members have asked for an easier way to choose the work that appears on the home page of their Fabrik sites, so we've expanded the options in Portfolios to do just that. You can add your projects to as many or as few Portfolios as you want, so make a new Portfolio for your home page and tell Fabrik to use it under the advanced settings. We put together a little Home Page Portfolio tutorial to show you how easy it is.
Profile Links
We've added a brand new feature to Fabrik to give you total control over what social networks and creative services you link your site to. Take a look at our Profile Links tutorial and get linking. We've covered the usuals like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram but we've also included places you may have your creative content like Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Behance, VSCO, SoundCloud and Dribbble.
Fabrik Heroes
Every month we're humbled by the new talent that joins Fabrik. Our community is incredibly important to us and we feature a brand new portfolio every week. Take a look at May's showcase. Our Fabrik Hero roster of godlike talent expanded by three in May with VFX artist Dave Gibbons, Filmmaker Neels Castillon and Director of Photography James Buck. Take a look at their inspiring work and get a little insight into what makes them tick.
If you've updated your Fabrik site this month and want to show us what you've been up to then include us in your tweets or use the #onfabrik hashtag so we can find you.
