Over the years, I’ve changed the look of RandomThink.net several times. It started its life as a Movable Type blog, and when they pulled their license fee stuff out some years back, I made the jump to WordPress, which I’ve been using for years, and with every major release, it seems like I wind up moving to a new theme.
Several times, I’ve tried designing my own look, and pretty much every time, it has been painful. The previous theme (with Gryphon in my head) wasn’t too bad, for a hand-rolled design. Some of my older readers may remember a particularly ugly theme I had at one point. Dark blues and greens. Seriously, I have no idea what I was thinking.
I built that theme on Sandbox. Code-wise, Sandbox was amazing. It was built on an amazing XHTML foundation, and gave designers a lot of room to play without having to change the DOM very much, if at all. I really liked Sandbox, but without solid design ability, it was immensely plain and simple — and as I have demonstrated time and time again, I’m not exactly talented in visual ways.
So, now I’m using the Carrington Theme, by Crowd Favorite. Carrington looks decently pretty by default, but should still give me a really strong foundation for design, while also giving me some more room to play in the code without altering the templates directly. Visually, it’s not quite me, but it’s a good sight better than what I’d crafted up before.
There’s a chance I’ll be using Carrington with a stock look for quite awhile, so I hope it doesn’t offend.
Up next: my first Monday in the sequence. Will I be writing up a musing? Will I be going off the rails already? Who knows? Stay tuned.
I’ve been planning to re-theme Cathartic Ink for awhile, but never seem to get to it. Right now I’m using a heavily altered version of Natural Essence I believe.