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Hi, my name is Fredrik Sørlie, and I’m a freelance designer located in Strømmen, just outside Oslo, Norway. This website is my window to the world. Whether you’re a friend, a client or family, you’re welcome to have a look at my work or check out my blog.

Blog Design

This falls head fashion - for me at least…

Finally got around to finish my mate Stian Sørlie’s website, and here’s my reward. A brand new Arai GP5K from his shop. Ever since I was a kid I’ve wanted one of these. After all, it is more or less the one most F1 drivers use.

I remember watching the older go-kart racers using GP2’s back in the early 90’s. They where so cool! Not that I didn’t have cool helmets myself. Back then I had a Simpson Bandit 5 and later a custom painted Simpson Super Shark. They where both badass, and I still love them to death. Still, never having owned an Arai has kind of bugged me - until today…

As with most wannabe/has-been racers, my personal helmet is the only thing that sets me apart from most trackday racers these days. It’s a statement that I used to be a “real” racingdriver. A reminder that I used to be serious about the sport and had ambitions. Allthough my long gone dreams of becoming a F1 driver never came through, at least I have my own helmet design!

Back in 1996 I got the Super Shark painted with my own design for the first time, and boy did it look awsome! I made the design myself, with pointers from automotive photographer Erik Nordlien. The helmet was painted by a guy in the UK who apparantly used to paint Johnny Herbert’s helmets. And he did a very good job with it, choosing nice colors and effects for the time.

10 years later my trusted old Super Shark had been through a lot, and paint had chipped several places. As I couldn’t afford a proper new helmet at the time, I decided to repaint it. Together with helmet painting guru Stian Paulsen, I did some major changes to the design, incorporating a lot of silver. The design turned out pretty cool, but the distinct features of my old design got a bit lost in the process. I just seem to prefer the old school helmet style with simple colors and design.

So my new Arai will get an updated version of my original design. Black and grey will replace some of the blue colors, and the red will become more orange. Just to make it stand out a bit more. But this time I will make sure that the white areas are kept clean, so that the distinct diagonal line at the front and the “F” on the side stay as visible as possible. It will be a high contrast, classic design and one that is truly my own.

My plugins of choice

If it weren’t for the plugins, WordPress would’ve be dropped in my trash can pretty much right away. However, thanks to several great developers all over the world, I was able to transform this blogging tool into a pretty awsome CMS. It did take some testing, and sometimes even some modding, but the result is almost worth the effort. By sharing my chosen plugins with the world, I might save some of you the trouble of trying out bad plugins, thus making my effort worthwhile :)

Here are the plugins that power my site:

• Advanced Excerpt
  Several improvements over WP’s default excerpt. The size of the excerpt can be limited using character or word count, and HTML markup is not removed.
• Akismet
  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• Category Selector Back to the Sidebar (MOD)
  Puts the category selector section back to the sidebar of the Post page.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
• Last.Fm Records
  The Last.Fm Records plugin lets you show what you are listening to, with a little help from our friends at last.fm.
• Lightbox 2
  Used to overlay images on the current page.
• PictureGrid
  Picturegrid - Add flickr to your blog, no mess, no fuss.
• PJW Page Excerpt
  Allows you to edit excerpts for Pages.
• Post-Plugin Library
  Does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins.
• Post Thumb Revisited
  Thumbnails images from your posts. Useful for listing popular posts, post list, etc.
• Recent Comments
  Displays a highly configurable list of the most recent comments.
• Reveal IDs for WP Admin
  Reveals hidden IDs in Admin interface that have been removed with WordPress 2.5 (formerly known as Entry IDs in Manage Posts/Pages View for WP 2.5).
• Sociable
  Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.
• Twitter for Wordpress
  Displays your public Twitter messages for all to read.
• WP-DBManager
  Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.
• WP Super Cache
  Very fast caching module for WordPress.

Website redesign

Allthough my old site was less than one year old, I felt it was about time to do some upgrades. As I’ve been using WordPress for a while now it was really about time I threw CuteNews out the window. The new site will be more interactive as visitors may leave comments on both my work and my blog, as well as subscribe to my newsletter and RSS feed.

There are still a few features left before the site is complete, so don’t worry if it doesn’t behave as expected. It soon will :)

Fredrik

Siste bilder fra Flickr

Favorite Links

• Favorites

  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • Imdb

• Friends

  • Atle Gulbrandsen
  • Einar Brenne
  • Kim Kristian
  • Martin Sørlie
  • Mr. Doricar
  • Petter Granlund
  • Stian Paulsen
  • Stian Sørlie

• Inspiration

  • Faveup
  • LogoPond
  • Styleboost

• Recognition

  • CSS Based
  • CSS Container
  • CSS Creme
  • CSS Daddy
  • CSS Design Yorkshire
  • CSS Galore
  • CSS Mania
  • CSSclip
  • cssfights
  • CssGlance
  • csshere
  • Design Shack
  • light on dark
  • Most Inspired
  • The Daily Slurp
  • We Love WP
  • WPCandy

Copyright © 2004-2008 Fredrik Sørlie
All rights reserved