NewSchool Learning is the creative weblog, portfolio, and business of web designer, Patrick Malley. Though we're a small design company located in the suburbs of South Bend, Indiana, our themes can be found on Moodle sites around the world.

We started making themes for Moodle because we felt that Moodle was ugly! We hope to prove that it doesn't have to be by creating the most attractive themes available. If this site improves the lot of themes available worldwide, then that would be great, too.

A second reason we design for Moodle is because we teach with Moodle. In addition to this gig, Patrick teaches U.S. History and Psychology at Niles High School in Niles, Michigan. He has fully incorporated Moodle into every aspect of his classroom, department, and school. This year, in fact, Moodle will be used in three of his district's buildings, making elearning possible for grades 6-12 in Niles Community Schools.

This is nothing more than a fancy way of saying that we visit a lot of CSS showcase sites and take notes when we find elements that we think will work well with Moodle's layout.

Once we have a good idea of what we want to create, we do a complete front page mockup of our design in Adobe Fireworks. This mockup is then used later to pull background images and colors.

We start every new design with fresh new code derived from the Standard theme folder. We then clear out everything but the essentials, building each theme from the ground up until every page looks exactly how we want it to look.

Every theme is tested in Safari, Firefox, IE6, IE7, Camino, and Opera. No theme is released until it looks fantastic in all of them. Then, we validate our code with the W3C. Only strictly validated code makes it to final release.

We're just as good at making Moodle look like existing webpages as we are at creating new and innovative designs. Regardless of where you are in the process, consider this:

All custom designs are backed by a full year of streamlined support.

We use Moodle every day. We know where the ugly parts are; we know how to fix them!

With every custom design comes a folder containing every source PNG file used.

50703 Rush Creek Ct.
Granger, Indiana 46530

574.968.4196

574.855.0297

Nobody's themes look better!