There’s a superb article by stv21 over at AlvaroBautista.co.uk – chronicling the history of Alvaro Bautista’s helmet designs throughout his MotoGP career.
And even better than that, you can also cast your vote on which is your favourite of all. Vote here…
It’s a fascinating feature and there’s lots of great pictures of the helmet designs; and I’m going to be very interested to see which lid comes out on top.
Enjoy! (And pass on!)
Bluer than Bleeding Gums Murphy!
But feeling blue in a good way though.
As you can probably see…
Welcome to the new-look BatiFan blog, overhauled for a number of varied reasons – though mainly to better serve passing on news and downloads etc as Alvaro moves into the top class for 2010. The Blogger page, whilst easy to post to, had come to feel very restrictive in many ways and I was getting bored with the static, very long, 2 column layout and the inflexibility of the ‘theme’ manipulation.
Given that pretty much all my other Alvaro Bautista, MotoGP, Aspar, El Canto Del Loco, and Pere Tutusaus websites have been moved over successfully to WordPress it made sense to do the same with the blog. In structuring the pages and adapting the skin I’ve tried to retain as much of a genuinely “bloggy” feel to the site – after all it’s NOT simply a news site – and I’ve also made the decision that it’s the right time to shift all the colours away from the Mapfre red that we’ve enjoyed for the last two years and to head off into Rizla Suzuki’s blue territory. Again though, I’ve tried to avoid the obvious – and as it’s NOT a Rizla Suzuki site I’ve avoided simply aping or copying their brand palette and stylings and gone for something that retains an independent aesthetic approach whilst remaining completely sympathetic to the team livery.
Anyway – we’re back and we’re better – hope you like the new lick of paint and the underlying rebuild. There may be further tweaks and adaptations here and there, but hopefully the BatiFan blog is now set to take us into 2010 and beyond as we follow Alvaro on his big MotoGP adventure.
Cheers,
gb
I have redesigned and put live a new ’09 version of www.alvarobautista.co.uk to complete a piece by piece overhaul of my network of Alvaro sites ahead of the start of the 2009 season. The other sites (this blog and the forum) have also seen a more subtle updating, largely in typographics and shifts in the presentation of our red-based colour planning.
I felt, however, that www.alvarobautista.co.uk required a bit more work as it hasn’t really been touched since the original launch (apart from a colour swap at the start of 2008). It has been a great opportunity to simplify the navigation – this is all now up in the page header, apart from stuff like the sitemap and contact pages which are now linked from the page footer – and to simlultaneously clean down the overall layout and structure, losing the lefthand and righthand navigation and building in simple flat blocks of colour derived from the design of the BatiFans.com Fan Forum.
There may well be other developments across the sites in the coming weeks/months and I’ll announce them as and when it’s appropriate.
For now, I hope you nejoy the new splash of paint…
gb
In a determined effort to put my Alvaro-related picture library (or “The Stash” as it is known in these parts…) to some good use, I’ve made one of those cool Mosaic posters, where you create a single (or apparently single) large image out of a vast quantity of smaller images.
In my initial experiments I found that shots in the box and ones that involved too much general detail didn’t really work out and that a cleaner, simpler image with a dulled-off background and a distinct foreground image worked out best by far.
So the result is an image of Alvaro leaning it in – from one of the Aspar Team’s excellent high resolution race images – made up of some 7,396 tiles comprising 2,685 individual pictures from Alvaro’s entire career, Talavera de la Reina, and other random Bati-related pics such as helmets on eBay etc!
The result, as shown above, is now available as a huuuuuuuuuuuuge high-resolution file that will gladly print out at A1 size (and probably even A0) and is a special Christmas prezzie for all the members of the BatiFans.com Avaro Bautista Fan Forum and which you can get by clicking here… (*Members Only)
Enjoy 
Well – as I’m sure you will have noticed as you are already looking at the blog here, things have all gone a bit red…. but it’s not just here – it’s also the main alvarobautista.co.uk website, the batifans forum, and our fanshop too.
Me & stv21 wanted to reflect the new livery (no matter how attached we are to the ‘old’ blue white and orange!) and to make sure our websites are seen as completely up-to-date and completely “2008” – as a truly top-flight international fansite empire should be…!
So a few weeks back, pretty much as soon as we first saw the new 2008 red livery first out on track in testing, we got working on overhauling the website design; updating the main site, the forum, the fanshop (and contents) and the blog – there’s been an awful lot to do; first getting the look right in mockups – and then building it all afresh – not only graphics but stylesheets, templates and all kinds of stuff! Followed by a lot of testing.
Along with changing the colours on the sites, you will notice we have added new ‘red’ wallpapers, signatures and forum avatars on the batifans forum, as well as some new e-cards on the main site.
Some things about the design we have kept fundamentally the same – the same basic typographic style with the big chunky Helvetica lettering, and some of the basic clean layout ideas and blocky graphics, but we have made the page headers a bit heavier by making more of the red (at least for now while we establish it as our new colour).
I hope you like the new look – and the new ‘red’ downloads and graphics, and the new ‘red’ gear in the FanShop – and that it all puts you in the 2008 mood!
I’ve done a very general 2008 MotoGP “Calendar” wallpaper – hopefully a nice download for a fan of any rider…
It’s a blue-ish design with grids and dots making up a world map and a semi-opaque treatment of a big bunch of MotoGP bikes sweeping into a corner overlaid on it.
It’s completed by a text listing of all the dates and locations of the 2008 MotoGP season.
Click here to find it in our MotoGP / 250cc / 125cc section over at BatiFans.com
Enjoy
