It's been months of thinking about this blog's theme. From simple ideas going to rough sketches, up to the actual Photoshop template. This theme is surely the best web template I ever done so far. The idea behind the theme was: dark, unique, complicated, centered on content, simple to navigate, transparent, cold and moody. I think every idea I want to show fits well with the theme.
Inspirations
Before starting out some sketches, I spent my precious time researching for portfolio/blog designs. As I stated above, this blog must be unique in terms of design. Everything must be exotic, when people visit self-implied expressions must be like
"Ohh this blog is something new!" or
"Whoa, who did that?". Here is the list where I got my inspirations:
I'm no ultimate right to tell that this design is 99% unique or stands out from the crowd. For me it just felt that I needed to do this. I needed to start throwing my ideas and not wait for the Recycle Bin to eat them all. The hardest part of initiating a personal design project is
to do start with it. As I can remember, I started day dreaming about my first blog design when I was in second year college (how long was that). I want to do it at that time but both the assuming time and people keeps on bugging me. It's totally hard to start but very easy to proceed. In the middle of the process of making this theme, there I said "This is going to be great! I want to finish this". And yeah I really nailed it!
The CSS
One thing I noted before I started to work with XHTML/CSS was the need for a compact framework. I've been doodling around
them all. At first I was so amazed by
Blueprint CSS, this css framework was actually very good on making use of grids. Everything was placed in properly and ready to fire up. But as I noticed in my recent projects, frameworks setting default grids can cause clutter for ambitious designs. If I understand it correctly, designs needed to be flexible and balanced in a way that designers are not jailed on default grids. That's why I switched to
Boilerplate, a very simple and compact css framework. No rules, no non-sense, all on your own, everything in the framework were pretty reasonable. Anyway we are the designer not the framework.
The Ooooppsss
I did stopped my scheduled posts because of my failed expectations of finishing this theme in a fraction of a week. But it turned to be a whole month! While working in this theme in parallel with my other jobs, I was really shocked that I already did reach a month. At first, I thought that achieving every detail in Wordpress will be so easy, well it was really easy in many cases but making unique pages (see
About and
Portfolio) was a bit difficult. But everything went well though, I managed to achieve all the details I want.
I'll be pumping back all the scheduled posts, especially on my
Design Rant series.
Upcoming Themes
I'll be developing more themes in Wordpress and probably release them all for FREE (yeah! including the current theme). So bee sure
to keep posted!
