Hi, this is Showkaku Sano.

I recently went to BitSummit, an indie game expo held in Kyoto. What I love about it is that the developers are often right there at their own booths, so you can talk to them directly before and after trying out their games.

Here's the May update, fresh off that excitement. No new features this month, but I managed to squash one pretty significant bug!

On the top page, some post thumbnails were failing to display, showing a string of raw text like {"content":[{"type":"image"... instead of the image.

This didn't happen in all cases. It was most likely to occur with posts reblogged from blogs whose names contained an apostrophe ('). If you never ran into this, that's probably why.

In v1.8.2, I updated the way data is stored to a safer method, which fixes the issue for posts with special characters in their source blog names.

If you've been seeing missing thumbnails, please go ahead and update! For instructions, check the help page “Update the Theme.”

This fix came from a bug report submitted by a user. If you ever run into any issues, please feel free to let me know. Your feedback really helps improve the theme.

Last month I wrote about why I make something like Illustfolio as a ready-made theme. This month, let me go back a bit further and talk about how I got into design in the first place.

Growing up, I tended to stay inside drawing rather than playing outside. I was really into copying things, but not just any drawings. I'd sketch out magazine covers, including all the typography, or game packaging, right down to the back-cover description text.

Eventually I started drawing made-up things in my sketchbook instead. Fictional magazines. Imaginary game box designs. I think I was doing this almost every day during school breaks. Looking back, that's probably what sparked my interest in design.

Later, when I started studying design at art school, a friend who was an illustrator was putting together a doujinshi (a self-published zine), and I helped design the cover. After doing that kind of work for a few years, I found myself more and more drawn to helping illustrators specifically.

Creating Illustfolio was a natural extension of all that. The desire to make something that helps illustrations look their best is something I still carry with me.

That’s it for this month’s newsletter! If you haven’t purchased the theme yet, you can get it here!

Also, feel free to check out my X and Instagram accounts.

Until next time!