Reason #2: New Designs!
As we were putting every effort into making Sandvox 2.8 Retina-ready, watching photos and design elements come alive on our Retina displays, we realized we really wanted do everything we could to showcase the Retina capabilities we were carefully building into Sandvox.
While looking through "Sandvox Sites", our customer-submitted collection of websites built with Sandvox, we noticed that some really cool photography sites were using designs from our friends at Behind the Rabbit. In particular, their designs developed specifically for Sandvox 2: Hydrogen and Krypton.
Both of them are simple, clean designs with very modern looks that we thought worked especially well for displaying photo galleries and photos.
Hmmm.... How might something like these look in a Retina-ready Sandvox?
We contacted Behind the Rabbit to see if we could work with them on designs inspired by Hydrogen and Krypton.
After talking, we decided that the ideal situation would be to simply include a Retina-ready version of Hydrogen and a streamlined, Retina-ready version of Krypton directly in Sandvox. This would make Retina-ready versions of these great designs available to all Sandvox customers.
Behind the Rabbit really knows CSS and how to stretch Sandvox designs to do amazing new things. Some of that requires code injection to make additional CSS tweaks to support more custom features. Krypton, especially, has expert-level customizations that exist outside of simply picking that design in the Design Chooser.
So, we worked with Behind the Rabbit to get Hydrogen and Krypton Retina-ready, AND created a streamlined version of Krypton (called Kryptonite) that is more suitable for non-experts, but can still be extended if desired.
The end result? Hydrogen and Kryptonite now ship as part of Sandvox, beginning with version 2.8.
Behind the Rabbit retains the rights to further develop its original Krypton design and may have additional announcements in the future. We also plan to exchange improvements with each other as we go forward.
We'd like to encourage you to visit Behind the Rabbit's new site, whose development was spurred on by our plans for this Sandvox update, to check out the all of the Sandvox tips, tricks, and designs that they have to offer.
We're extremely pleased to include Hydrogen and Kryptonite in Sandvox.
We hope you like them as much as we do!