Another New Theme

So I thought about it for a while and I was growing tired of the look of the site. The theme was based on an Upstart Blogger theme that is great, but I was in a rush and it really didn’t come out looking how I envisioned it. So once I decided that it needed to change my initial thought was to create a whole new theme from scratch using Sandbox. I designed the theme is Photoshop and started to implement it into the Sandbox platform but I ran into the same problems as I did on my last theme quest. After some frustrating hours, I came to the conclusion that it would take too long for me to create a theme from scratch, I just don’t have that kind of patience. So I ended that and began focusing on finding a theme that was very simple, easy to customize and was built on some kind of grid system. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy.

After some searching I finally found Marber by Apt Studio. It’s based on Romek Marber’s 1961 grid for Penguin Books, which is a huge plus, and when I looked at the CSS it was all clean and easy to understand. In no time I was on my way to creating a theme that I think represents my style as well as the content of this blog. I wanted a simple, clean design that payed homage to the modernist era and I think I accomplished. What ya think?

I’m going to be tweaking it in the next few days so pardon me if the site is down for quick changes. I haven’t tested how it looks on a PC so if those of you who do use a PC could give me some feedback that would be great.

I want to thank the folks at Apt Studio for creating such a wonderful theme. It might not be a theme with the most “eye candy” but it sure has a lot of underlining meaning to the form and structure that makes it so valuable. You can read a bit of the background to the theme here.

Here are some features:

  • A simple, two-column theme.
  • Six colour schemes, easily changed via the backend.
  • Three layouts, for 800px width, 1000px width, and fully fluid, again easily switched via the admin panel.
  • Widgetized sidebar.
  • WP 2.3+ only – includes tags.
  • Typographically set to a baseline grid.
  • Author comment highlighting.
  • Cross-browser compatible, with subtly different layouts for Mozilla, Webkit and IE browsers.
  • Integrated microformats.
  • Fully valid XHTML and CSS.
  • Integrated WordPress.com stats (with no smiley!).
  • Custom 404 page.

       

The Evil Widows & Orphans

Personally I can’t stand widows and orphans and I’ve encountered a number of designers that pay no attention to them, some of them don’t even know what they are. A shame really. Anyway, one thing I don’t like about WordPress is how there’s almost no way to easily control the typography of each post. In comes Typogrify, a plug-in originally created by Christian Metts for Django and ported to WP by Hamish. It’s an excellent little plug-in that includes the Smartypants and Widont engines.

Here’s what it can do:

– Prevents text “widows”.

– Run text through SmartyPants.

– Wrap initial quotes (and French style (Guillemets) quotes) in class=’dquo’ or class=’quo’ depending on if they are single or double.

– Wrap ampersands in class=’amp’.

– Wrap multiple adjacent capital letters in class=’caps’.

– Add a thinspace before and after en and em dashes.

– And of course it has a function to do all of the above.

I love the damn thing and it will make my life more fulfilling. If you run a WP blog download the plug-in so we can do away with Widows & Orphans once and for all!

Via I Love Typography