Beware though! He’s a sneaky guy… Pow!

Mr. Jon Hicks

Over the past couple months we’ve had the pleasure of working with the pixel surgeon, and icon designer extraordinaire that is Jon Hicks.

We commissioned Jon to re-design our popular ninja mascot that you would have seen busting moves all around our site. Our ninja was originally traced and vectorized based on a freely available icon design. However, we got so many people emailing us, and kindly informing us, that our ninja was being illegally used on other sites across the interwebs that we thought it was high time that we sat down and designed our own, unique mascot that epitomizes WooThemes ethos.

Let’s hand over to Jon for more information about the brief we gave him, and his creative design process.

Jon's doodles in his sketchbook that I'm sure a lot of designer's would like to take a peak in

The first stage is to get sketching. If you look at the page from my sketchbook you’ll see that the first sketches were fairly crude doodles, but as I got used to drawing the character it improved. The last 2 sketches went well, and I worked further into these with black pen and a very soft 6b pencil to quickly add shading.

Shading the two best character sketches

Once these sketches were approved, they were imported into Illustrator, and the process of creating rough vector artwork began. This stage uses the minimum amount of work to show how it will look. So while it doesn’t have any detail as such, it as the basic shapes with gradients. I also started developing 3 poses (two of which were similar) to show different aspects of the character. The main one – where the Ninja is doing a kick mid-air, has a more determined or concentrated expression, whereas the others are softer and cuter.

Vectorizing a shaded sketch

The ninjas in different positions

Early versions of the characters had very rounded off hands and feet, but this didn’t convey enough personality, so these were changed to have more definition, but still look rounded. These vector roughs are then iterated on until the final detailed version is created.

Adding more detail to the hands, shading and body positioning

And so we present you with our stronger, sleeker and more agile Woo ninjas ready for duty on the WooThemes site. You’ll see these guys replacing the early recruits around the site shortly.

The final ninjas with their woo badges ready for action

The exact hours you work are pretty flexible, you can work from home and earn good money, not to forget you receive a developer’s license to all our themes. All we require from you are some great html/css skills and sound wordpress knowledge, as well as a love for WooThemes. We request a minimum of 500 forum posts a month (exact terms available upon request).

Sound attractive? We are only accepting one Master Woo Ninja for now so if you think you have what we need get hold of us asap on info@woothemes.com.

We’ve just made another value-adding feature available to all WooThemes user, in the form of approved WooTheme modifiers. Since the launch of WooThemes, we’ve built up a dedicated group of Forum Ninja’s that assist in running & maintaining the forums. From this group of Ninja’s, we are now approving the best one’s as official WooThemes modifiers.

This means that they can take care of all the modification work for you and then you simply pay them for their work. These guys & girls know our themes inside / out by now – so if you work with them, you’re sure to get a heavily modified version of our themes, that should look amazing enough to get into our elite showcase.

This service is only for modifying our themes. When you send your enquiry, remember to specify which theme you would like to modify and be very specific about what modifications you would like. You’ll have to purchase the theme before we will start modifying the theme for you.

So if you’re keen, you can shoot over to our Contact page for details on how to get in touch with them.

So that is where you come in… We are looking for some skilled peeps to join us on the forum and help out other WooThemes users, as it is important to us to further increase the value from our support resoures. We need someone that is proficient in HTML, CSS, PHP (intermediate) & also WordPress, as those are the skills needed to answer 99% of the requests…

Details of the job:

Here’s all of the information with regards to the job as a Forum Ninja…

• We will pay you a negotiable fee for every post that you make on the forum;
• You can work on flexible time (i.e. whenever suits you), as long as all forum requests are answered within 12 hours;
• We will still offer help to the threads that you can’t answer;
• You will get a free Developer Subscription to all of our themes, to allow you to familiarize yourself with the themes’ inner workings (and you will be allowed to use these themes yourself).

How to apply:

So if you think you have what it takes, we’d love to hear from you… Drop us an e-mail on info [at] woothemes.com, with the subject line being “Forum Ninja” and include as much details about yourself and your skills.

We will respond to all e-mails / applications that we get!