ps.design
When I saw a tweet from Inspired Magazine calling for a web designer who could design a WordPress theme in partnership with them, I jumped at the chance of working with a great blog and website. Sending a quick email over, they responded with a resounding yes, with only a few points in mind when it came to designing the theme, and a choice of design only or go the whole hog and code the theme up too. I went with the simple option of designing the site.
One of the main themes for the design was for it to be simple, and to keep bloggers in mind. Another was that they didn't want the theme to look like the usual themes, as seen on ThemeForest and WooThemes, with the big image slider and themes looking pretty much the same. Another thing was an emphasis on good design as that was target audience - designers.
My initial thought was to do a design like a Tumblog, with custom posts, but eventually settled on an even simpler idea of just having a big featured image and the post content, with links to social networks and Flickr. That's it. And then with that came the idea of the use of texture, and took from the masters of simplicity - Apple. Creating the texture, using a tutorial from Abduzeedo, I decided on a two column theme with clear contrasting columns, each complimenting the other. In the left column, a simple navigation menu, Flickr images and social images, along with categories and posts tags. On the right the content, featuring a large image thumbnail, and a basic text layout. Originally, there was meant to be a sticky footer, but as the theme was being coded, this became more of a problem than a solution, so it was removed from the final design.
Originally, I wanted as many CSS effects as possible to create the theme that I'd designed, and the final theme is as close as you're going to get to a pixel perfect conversion. The great guys over at Purlize coded the theme and have done an amazing job converting it, and putting up with my endless list of changes! You'll be able to download the full theme soon straight from Inspired Magazine for free, but for now, you can preview the theme using the link underneath.
