natebates.com

Well, the blog is up and the design is underway.

Right now it’s looking way too similar to Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction, but I hope to be creating my own unique spin on it as soon as I get some inspiration.

See, I started with Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus theme, changed a couple light greys to dark greys, and boom, I had a Subtraction clone.

It’s not my intention to rip anyone off and I’m hoping that I can modify my theme so that it’s not a stolen design. I’ve only recently been exposed to grid design so it might take me a while to get a hang of its intricacies. I mean, I’ve always had a decent feel for laying things out in an organized manner, but it’s interesting to see actual specific rules behind design techniques. Grid design has been used on the web for a while (and for longer in print), and it may no longer be “cool”, but I don’t need many fancy graphics for a blog and I really like the minimalism of many grid-based designs.

Theming WordPress is pretty simple and perhaps I should’ve done my own design from the start. I was a little intimidated, though, since my last experience with CMS was with Drupal and creating a theme for Prime Health Solutions at my old job. That project was a little tricky since we were customizing everything a lot, but WordPress is improving my opinion of CMS’s. Perhaps that’s because WordPress was designed to facilitate exactly what I’m trying to create: a simple blog.

I’ll keep tweaking this blog’s theme and hopefully I can come up with something a little more original. Right now my main concern is to make it complete and consistent, apologies to Khoi Vinh during the process.