The Making of the StevoTVR Theme
In the previous post, I said I would write about the making of this theme. I created it from scratch, but I used some free resources in the process. So here I will link to all those resources so that you may find them useful.
First of all, creating a WordPress theme is surprisingly easy. The obvious place to learn about making themes is the WordPress Theme Development documentation. You can also check out this tutorial, which starts with the very basics of HTML and walks you through the building of a theme. It is somewhat outdated, though, and doesn’t cover threaded comments for instance.
After creating the base structure, I started working on the header. I started with a base of a texture from the Tutorial9 Grunge Cement Texture Pack with some color and contrast adjustments. I also added some visual enhancements with some of these grunge Photoshop brushes. The warning stripe textures in the header and footer are the ETC Grunge Stripes Pattern. The font used in the header is called Stencilia-A, from which I created a template and used the paint tool to simulate spray painting.
The Stencilia-A font was also integrated into the navigation and headers using cufón, which uses pure JavaScript to render fonts. This allows you to use fonts that users are not likely to have installed. Other options I considered are sIFR and typeface.js.
So that’s the story of the StevoTVR WordPress theme. I may post some more detailed info in the future. I hope someone finds some of this useful!