February 25, 2008

This is the first post in my series, Themery : Blogged, where I blog about each step of a WordPress theme design.

When it comes to planning website designs I tend to take the seat-of-the-pants approach, which is to say I mock up some generalities in Photoshop then start building. In some ways I won’t be doing anything different this time round, but I have made an attempt to stop myself and think about things before getting started.

As I write this I haven’t even opened photoshop, or created my theme folder. It would be easy for me to design the site and then create the prep work, but it didn’t work well when I was doing art at school, and it won’t be an honest portrayal if I do it now.

What I have done is to take some of my ideas and, with very rough sketches, try and visualise them, what will work, and most importantly what will clearly not work. In each post I will be looking at one page in my planning process. Today it is feel.

You can see from the image that these are very rough sketches but they are useful.

I’ve started with the overall feel (top left). The words that come to mind are clean, minimalist, focus on the content not the amount of content, avoid clutter, white white white, and strong grid.

With the exception of the last one, which is more a definitive design point than an abstract feeling, I have pretty well defined that it will be the opposite of the news / magazine style themes that are currently popular. What I have in mind is an empty page with a post on it. Easier said than done sometimes but that is the starting point.

Any time you decide to focus on a minimalist design you open yourself up to criticism. With very little except text on the page it is very easy for someone to suggest that it is lazy, or simply that your graphics skills must not be up to much.

If we are being honest sometimes those things are true. My graphics skills are not great and I never really could draw very well.

Those criticisms, however, tend to speak more to the critic, than the designer.

In the past I have described great minimalist design as the absolute pinnacle of design. It is the point at which everything you want and need is available, but somehow hidden until you need it. Where nothing exists without purpose, and everything that exists is something you both need and want. To appreciate great minimalism you need to understand it and that means knowing more than the basics. Often it means walking through the full range of design options and out the other side.

Now, I am not aiming to achieve great things with this theme; I would love to produce something truly sublime, but in reality I am just intending to make use of some of the principles. WordPress themes are more than just a design, they are about how you use WordPress itself, how, or whether, you use all of the information at your disposal.

I have chosen to design with a minimalist feel because I know that when I get to the next parts of this series, Navigation, Single Post Content, Archives, Home Page, & Text Devices, I am going to need to think very carefully about the way the information is presented, the way it is accessed and, although I will be looking at all the design elements first, I will need to give thought at the back of my mind to the way I am going to use WordPress itself to connect and control all of the information

Choosing this style means I avoid the need to revolutionise the way sidebars are displayed, and the temptation to pack more and more features in. This will by no means be simple though. I am aiming for subtlety and I think that may be the hardest thing of all.

Tomorrow I will consider the navigational structure.

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