Bite Sized Skins

You adopted The­sis for its pow­er­ful Word­Press mus­cles. Finally, a pre­mium theme that allowed you to make all the cus­tomiza­tions your heart desired! Unfor­tu­nately, you’ve only got­ten as far as chang­ing the colours of your links. Now your site looks like all the other The­sis themed sites.

What’s a non-web-designer to do?

You could hire your­self a Word­Press Designer (like me) to do the heavy lift­ing. You could learn to do all of this your­self (with the help of violetminded’s The­sis tuto­ri­als). Or, you could buy the solu­tion on the cheap. Some­thing that you could just upload to your site and it would work with­out much fuss.

I’ve got you covered.

Intro­duc­ing… Bite Sized* Sites.

It can be expen­sive to hire some­one to do the design work from scratch if all you want is some­thing sim­ple. These lit­tle babies are your sal­va­tion from the (some­times) hor­rors of design-it-yourself; they won’t cost you a month’s rent. I’ve taken all the guess­work out.

All you need to do is deter­mine which Bite-Sized skin is right for you.

*Not a reli­able source of sus­te­nance. Might I sug­gest a cupcake?

What the frak do I know, anyway?

I know The­sis’ front-end cus­tomiza­tion inside and out. I’ve been design­ing (almost exclu­sively) using The­sis since the tail-end of 2009. I have five years of expe­ri­ence in web design, includ­ing three years design­ing front-end inter­faces for the soft­ware gigs I used to hold. I’ve got a throng of happy clients with glow­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als about the strength of my design muscles.

I knew I’d reached my own web design capac­ity. It was time to hire a pro­fes­sional. Amanda totally met and exceeded my hopes while simul­ta­ne­ously redefin­ing the word “bril­liant.” – Ronna Det­rick (Rene­gade Con­ver­sa­tions)

She’s fast, has an incred­i­ble eye for design, color and UI. And even bet­ter than that is her pas­sion for her work. – Julie Roads (Writ­ing Roads)

So, what are these skins about anyway?

Here’s the first theme, with more on the way. (Look for a new one each week.)

Grey Sky Thursday

The Pho­to­shop Mockup

It was a rainy day in Van­cou­ver (sur­prise?) when I came up with the design con­cept behind this skin. I wanted to cre­ate a soft palette that was cloudy, moody, and fem­i­nine with­out being overly girly. The result was splashes of colour (blues, teals, pur­ples, pinks, and even green) that looks a lot like a water­colour paint­ing. Two columns. Empha­sis on con­tent. Atten­tion to detail. Lots of white space. Min­i­mal­is­tic. True vio­let­minded style.

The money is in the footer, with its reach­ing puffs of colour.

Fea­tures: two columns, water­colours, cus­tomiz­able .PSD header, cus­tom typog­ra­phy
Best for: per­sonal sites, writ­ers, artists

Read more about Grey Sky Thurs­day.

Love the skin? Sweet! Buy it now.