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!