Theming
Looking at lots of new blogs during Blaugust and Robert Birming's SepThemeBear and his blog theme building guide has got me thinking about themes, blog design, and such.
Back in May I wrote about how I was having too much fun with CSS. And I really did, styling up my pages.
Gridranger, Tabitha and JetGirlArt have a desktop style. re: nyman is an email inbox.
Angry Bunnyman has a striking boxy layout. Sylvia at departure.blog and Olu have very vertical column styles.
The Satyrs’ Forest has a gorgeous theme that the user can change options on. Ribo.zone is old school cool. omz13 allows the user to change many of the theme options.
Brennan has a lovely design and so many interesting pages, stats, and so on. James's with words, wonder is laid out like a poem, a wander through the site rather than the traditional navigation. VH Belvadi has book vibes.
Pete Millspaugh has lovely typography and such a fun light/dark toggle. Lyons in Beta is so bold.
Cat writes about Decorating the blog for Halloween. Robert Birming has the Bear Blog library, lots of themes and seasonal themes and tweaks. I'll also shoutout Sylvia's dev site, Anarchae, and Mighil. Reedy Bear made a book theme.
There's loads more, these are just ones I'm pulling off the top of my head.
I've been playing around with a whole new theme that I wouldn't use but it was kind of fun. Frustrating also, because I just can't get it how I want. I get excited about something and then it looks meh. Not just the technical side but just the design.
I love typography but I worry about two things: getting it wrong because while I love fonts I don't think I'm very good at picking them, and bogging the site down. I have used Melodrama on my 1934 Inverness page because I like the Thirties vibe.
A lot of my pages now have their own themes - just little tweaks mostly - and maybe I should do that more with posts. I gave an upcoming autumn post a yellow background - maybe posts could be seasonally themed? Or alternate, or randomise. It would be a bit much to make their own like the pages. But something to contemplate.
This conflict between wanting to be simple, fast, clean versus a more original, personal style. And what that style would even be: my notes page is bolder and the sitemap is more book-style - I like them both! I want the site to look like the inside of my brain feels. A goblin grotto.