Monday marked the launch of the brand spankin’ new WordPress theme I told you about last Friday, and you can check out the first rollout over at Tech.Erati. The basic idea here was to produce a template that could be used across a variety of interrelated sites, creating the look and feel of a magazine when viewed as a whole. I’ll let you be the judge of how well I’ve achieved that. For the sake of comparison, you ought to check out Miz Liz on Biz, too, which represents the second implementation of the newly-dubbed “Eratizine.”
For a couple of weeks, I had mulled over the idea of producing a template for the Erati network, but I hadn’t really come up with anything that I was overly excited about. On the plane ride out to Vegas, however, I read my first issue of WIRED magazine, and I began to realize how interconnected we designers really are, regardless of our individual mediums.
Magazine design and web design are, in my opinion, very closely related. For web designers who deal with fixed-width layouts (as I do), the bond between print and web design is even stronger. Anyway, while reading WIRED, I started to pay very close attention to small, web-esque details like titles, headlines, and attetion calls to informational boxes (be they graphical, textual, or whatever). After a good hour of checking things out, all of the thoughts about the Eratizine template that had been swirling around in my head began to mesh together into a cohesive whole. I then realized what I would do for the design, and on top of that, I found a really great place to get inspiration for future sites – magazines! Seems obvious now, but…Whodathunkit??
Hopefully, there are a few of you out there who are thinking, “Hey, I’d like to use that theme!” Unfortunately, I’m not going to be releasing Eratizine for public consumption, as it dovetails with the Erati business model. The theme is a part of that network’s branding, so that means it’s off limits as far as open source themes go.
No worries, though. I’ll be producing a new, free WordPress theme sometime in the first quarter of 2006, so if you want to smell what the rock’s cookin, you can get some of that when the time comes.
Oh, and to the guy who bashed the design of this site, I thought it was pretty ironic that you’re using a widely-available, non-individualized theme on your personal site. Not only that, the color scheme wasn’t that different from my own. I may have taken your comment differently if you’d had a wicked design, but then again, somebody who knows a thing or two about design probably wouldn’t spout off like that, either.