Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

I just uploaded a new theme. Here’s how I work. I have a base theme that gets updated with the current best technical ideas of my themes. All the good structure ideas go into the base theme that I would generally want all themes to have. Then the other themes need to be updated with those ideas. Things such as style naming schemes might need to be updated. I rotate through the themes to update them and as I do, the base theme gets updated with any additional new ideas I come up with as I’m working. If I wait long enough, this is a pretty big deal and I may as well take that opportunity to make other changes to the theme as well.

That’s essentially what happened here. I had a lot of new technical ideas and new design ideas that went into this theme. I wanted something super dramatic, which I think I got. What shaped the whole theme was I wanted the Designoplasty logo to actually show the real page background, revealing something nice. In many ways this one design decision dictated many of the other decisions that were made.

I really like the colors that came out of this. I still feel like choosing colors is very random. I basically find one color I like and then try to generate other colors from that. This brown was originally black, but I was having some gradient aliasing issues which I thought would be mitigated by making it brown. They weren’t. I ended up fixing those another way, but kept the brown. Then the red seemed to go with the brown, although I went through a lot of iterations on that. Then the link colors were another big work item. I think of all things link colors are the hardest. For some colors, text in the color has a totally different appearance than lines or boxes in that same color. That’s why the hover lines for the red text are a totally different color. Because if I had used the same color it would have looked very weird.