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Smashed

Recently this site has been featured in Smashing Magazine. Being linked from one of those inspirational sites you read everyday was a big surprise for me. I couldn’t be happier to be among all those good examples on minimalist design. That said, if you are stoppping by from there, welcome!

I’ve been asked many times to release this design as a Wordpress theme. The good news is that, eventually, some day it will be free. The bad news is that, for now, it’s impossible.

I’ve started this design as a contribution to the Wordpress community. I wanted something clean, with a focus on typography, and inspired in the International Typographic Style. Never found a theme suitable for me. So I made my own design, with the idea of releasing a working version soon. After days, I ended up with a very complex design, morphed into a very complex theme running a customized Wordpress engine. You can read more about the development process in this portfolio page.

I needed to manually hack the templates for displaying different post styles (mini-posts, quotes, movie reviews, music reviews). I also hacked the inner pages to look different from the main blog page. Even the contact form plugin was spruced up. The truth is that what you see is an ever evolving work in progress; and I don’t think I’m finished yet.

In short: trying to release this complex beast as a free, one click installable theme, is a bit of an utopia. It will definitely require your direct input and certain Wordpress knowledge to look under the hood.

However, in the coming days, I will write about the whole design and development process: the functionality (site structure, post styles, page styles); the design (grid, typography and the golden rectangle), and the implementation (Wordpress theme development, plugins).

So, stay tunned!

Comments for this entry

Loothi

User

Sounds great! Look forward to seeing your WP template.. even if it has idiosyncrasies.

Daniel Black

User

Hi there,

This is in no way intended offensively, but I must say, this design looks crazy lots like Khoi Vin’s iconic Subtraction. It’s a wonderful design, but either (a) this coinciding design aesthetic and execution is an outlier on the distribution of design variability; or (b) you like his stuff, too, and tweaked it just enough that it doesn’t look exactly like his.

Mind you, no judgement; but I’d be curious to see if this is (a).

Regards,

Daniel

Rodrigo

User

Hi Daniel!

I love Khoi’s stuff, and he’s a wonderful inspiring designer to me, everyday. In fact, I did send my site to him so he can check it out. He didn’t said I stole him, so, rest assured, this is not a copy of Subtraction, neither it’s intended to be a tweaked version of it.

Daniel Black

User

Hi, Rodrigo,

Great foresight and class on your part. I have perhaps become a bit jaded with the number of sites blatantly stealing designs, though I did notice that there were a few substantive differences. The influence is unmistakable, but we’ve all got our heroes. At least it has design. +)

I’m curious about something in your design, then. The comment body type is larger, and seems to escape its containing dd/dl/div (one or more of ‘em), at least with FF 2.0.0.18 on WinXP. More than the overflow, though, the larger type creates–for me–a schizm in the visual flow. Taking Khoi’s work as inspiration, we see he maintains the same size and weight of type in his comments as in his post, using the gridlines as differentiators. I wonder if there is a way to distinguish the comments visually, subtly, that doesn’t disrupt the visual flow. Of course, these are my unschooled opinions.

Wishing you continued success.

Daniel

Rodrigo

User

Daniel,

Everything is fixed right now. It was a CSS bug. I’m trying to not use more than 3 font sizes, and no more than 2 typefaces (Helvetica and Palatino).

Daniel Black

User

Looks very nice, Rodrigo. I neglected to congratulate you on being mentioned in Smashing Magazine. Kudos.

Regards,

Daniel

alfonso

User

Hey Rodrigo! wow, I can see english is the dominant comments language here, hehe!,
Very nice and clean desing, nice place to rest the eyes after a bussy day. I really love it.
Congratulations!!

o Felicitaciones! (hablando en cristiano)
Un abrazo che

The Old Fashioned » Introducing Modern Clix: A free Wordpress theme

User

[...] took me almost a week to simplify this design (see the previous discussion) and test it: I never thought that releasing a Wordpress theme could be so difficult and time [...]

» ?????

User

[...] took me almost a week to simplify this design (see the previous discussion) and test it: I never thought that releasing a Wordpress theme could be so difficult and time [...]

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