For a while now I was getting pretty tired with my old blogging theme, and wanted to restyle the whole thing. For the new theme I wanted to be able to use widgets, which makes changing your layout so much easier. I also wanted to use the extra screen real estate everybody has nowadays by broadening the columns up a bit, and have the content adapt to the screen size.
Since I like minimal themes I went for something without a lot of images in it. I still like gradients, even though I’ve heard they’re so 2007, but I used them nevertheless. I’m not a graphics artist, so a wicked looking vintage or cool scruffy looking layout isn’t up my league anyway. Gradients are super easy to do in GIMP btw, which makes my life so much easier, and I like that.
The theme itself is based on SandBox, which is awesome. Building a good theme from scratch for WordPress is pretty hard and wasn’t my ambition anyway, and SandBox sure makes it easy to concentrate on style alone. Another SandBox theme I drew inspiration and CSS examples from is Takimata. This is probably one of the most original SandBox themes around, and is definitely worth a look if you’re looking for something different. I almost used this one as is.
To see the theme in all its glory any browser except Internet Explorer will do. Thanks to Browsershots I tested the new layout on more browsers than I can remember, and IE is the only one that isn’t displaying the geeky looking slashes in front of the titles. Check the screenshot if you’re not on a kick ass browser btw.
Some tweaking will probably be done in the next few weeks, but with the widgetized sidebars, that’s possible without having to change a single line of code, which is awesome.
Yay!