home » design, graphics, theme

Artisteer: the automated Web Designer, a quick review

31 May 2009 238 views View Comments
ยป vCard | lsd@twitter | the Japan serie | lsd@tumblr | lsd@flavors.me

And so I tried it out and ready to make a review, as stated early.

Artisteer 2 is a simple program for PC made to make your layouts easy and quick: with a nice interface (that sometimes reminds to MSOffice) lets you choose tons of styles to build up any Joomla or Drupal or WordPress or CSS layouts with few steps.

Its motto is quite capturing: WEB DESIGN REVOLUTION – and even testimonials speaks fine of this product.

You can choose between suggested layouts and color schemes (really a lot) and decide to modify those selected or build up from scratch with several combos of colors and tones.
Two columns? Three? One? Choose from premade or adjust at your needs.
Darker colors? Marine? Sunflowers? There are varietys to combine.
Widget ready? Simple? With login pane? With several informations? No problem at all!
Header with images? Your custom logo? Some words? Position where you like, with fonts you like, dimension you like.
Just create what your mind imagines.
And there is a satisfying documentation and even forums to have a look at.
And if you want to have a sneak peak of the result, try this live demo of Virg0 Music Project or see a demo introduction here, at their website.

That’s the good part.
The not-so-good part is that all layouts are the same: don’t think you can create a masterpiece award-winning: the combination of those schemes aren’t infinite.
Unless you are a Joomla/Drupal/CSS/WordPress advanced coder you won’t be able to create something too different from those premade.

The final valutation is quite good, it’s a great tool to start designing.
You can try a demo from here, you can play around but you need to register (to buy, you know) in order to use it fully; otherwise your generated layout/theme will be heavily watermarked.
Price for Home&Academic Edition is USD49.95 (you can design only CSS and WordPress themes and you have up to 75% of image gallery available) while Standard Edition is USD129.95 (fully functional, all gallery available and all exportation allowed).

You also may find interesting

E ancora:

  1. How to be a webdesigner: a bucket list of free resources
  2. Website: Music Project almost ready
  3. Chris Coyier: arts behind the man and viceversa – (semi) serious interview with CSSTricks frontman
  4. Thematic, Wordpress e le considerazioni di Fabio “marbio” Marasco
  5. Making of a wallpaper: create yours, for free, using X3Studios and your imagination
      
                              
  • Excellent blog, thanks for the post!
  • You're welcome!
  • If you want to design Artisteer themes, but you don't want to buy it just click on my name.
  • @Dan: that's also a way to publish themes.
    I'm reporting the excerpt form your site:

    If you don't want to buy Artisteer, but you made a theme in the program and you want it published, then this is your chance! It costs $5 per theme conversion. Please send the theme to artisteer@silverhosting.us and once I see that the $5 has been paid, I will convert the Artisteer project file into a Drupal, Joomla, HTML, or Wordpress theme. Please use the same email when paying for the theme and sending the template, so I know its the same person.
    What you get: A zip file and a regular folder of the theme.
  • Leon Whitaker
    I think this program can be such a palliative for people ableness to draw and the final result will be a large amount of cloned design template.

    Your interpretation is quite valid and I agree with the concept of misleding creativeness singularities.

    Will have a try, want to test it also by myself :)
  • @Leon: you are right, in this kind of designing thing there is the high risk to clone themes and layouts and to have a facsimile variety of places.
    Maybe even the internet is arrived at its terminal dogma.

    Let me know what do you think about Artisteer =)
blog comments powered by Disqus