I’ve closed the comments for this thread to consolidate all comments for the different versions of the Typograph theme in one place. Please leave all your comments at the Typograph page which can be found by clicking here.

I’ve been planning to launch a proper free WordPress theme for some time now but there have always been major projects in the way. This week I had some extra time so I sat down and developed the Typograph theme which is now available for anyone to use. For free.

The theme is as simple as possible with clear separation between the content and the sidebar, a calm gray and white design with popping red links, a tabbed sidebar box with navigation, search and other important elements and some other styling for increased readability and better navigation. It complies with the new WordPress standard elements like image captions and Gravatars and even has a customizable ad space directly under the first post on the front page. And last but not least, Typograph is fully  XHTML and CSS standards compliant.

Download the Typograph theme from the WordPress Theme Directory here!

See a demo of the Typograph theme here

No images

Right before I began the design of this theme, Spyremag published an article about 5 ways to break your design habits, one of which was to design a site using no images. Seeing as I’ve become somewhat obsessed with CSS over the last year it seemed only appropriate to follow this advice and create a no-images theme. Not only would this be a bit of a challenge because I ususually use a lot of images to make my designs more vibrant, but it would also put my coding skills and my understsanding of WordPress themes to the test.

Styled from scratch

Over the last several months I’ve been refining and customizing a copy of the Sandbox WordPress theme to develop an ideal platform for quick and easy WordPress theme design. The plan is to create a “God Theme” if you will that has all the bells and whistles installed and ready to go so that new theme design is quick and efficient. To put the alpha version of this foundation theme to the test I used it to style Typograph from scratch.

Tabbed box navigation

When I created the new theme for Design is Philosophy I spent quite a bit of time developing and perfecting a JQuery and CSS based tabbed sidebar box that would contain navigation as well as other useful information for the visitor. For Typograph I further developed the tabbed box and isolated it in it’s own file to simplify customization for the user. It can also easily be deactivated by commenting out a single line of code in the sidebar.php template. The tabbed box contains navigation for pages and categories along with an about section, RSS link and search box by default. It takes standard WordPress tags and can be customized to include pretty much anything by editing the tabbedBox.php file found in the theme directory.

Download the Typograph theme from the WordPress Theme Directory here!

See a demo of the Typograph theme here

Case in point: During my daily spam filter read this one caught my eye because it was so bizarre:

make your site legal…

Avoid legal trouble, make your website compliant with the law. It will save you from serious problems. The best part…you can do it in under 60 minutes….

Now clearly my site is legal so the comment is somewhat misdirected. But what I find amusing is the actual wording because it shows how this particular spam bot works. Obviously it spidered my blog and found the word “compliant” somewhere (undoubtedly in an article about standards compliant code) and misinterpreted it to be a reference to the rule of law rather than the rule of the W3C. But the really amusing part is that if you just change a few key words the comment actually starts making sense for web designers:

make your site standards based…

Avoid validation trouble, make your website compliant with web standards. It will save you from serious problems. The best part…you can do it in under 60 minutes….

Much better, no?