kartooner

In response to Matt’s Word­Press Color Scheme con­test, I’ve cre­ated a theme I dub “Pump­kin” — a vari­a­tion of kartooner.com’s color scheme — and sub­mit­ted it as an entry in the con­test. One of the stip­u­la­tions of the con­test is that you can­not mod­ify the lay­out, but you can go hog wild with the colors.

With a bit of tweak­ing, I man­aged to apply the style sheet to my own Word­Press back­end, includ­ing a few inter­face changes, more­over things that I’ve been both­ered by since day one. We all have our pref­er­ences, and while WordPress’s color scheme out the box is suit­able for the new user, a power designer like myself yearned for the day when I’d have the time to make a few changes.

While I’m quite fond of the font Geor­gia, I’ve always wanted to change the admin menu font to Arial or Ver­dana and decrease the font size. Partly because I’d rather keep as many of the items on the menu (Links, Cat­e­gories, Upload) on one line. As more menu links are added, they are wrapped to the next line depend­ing on the amount of space. Decreas­ing the font size keeps as many links on the menu bar as possible.

Also, in my expe­ri­ence Arial and Ver­dana just look bet­ter in menu inter­faces. Despite this minor tweak I decided to keep Geor­gia around as the main font for the rest of the back­end inter­face. It’s easy on the eyes and reminds me of the typo­graphic qual­ity of a novel.

Here’s a screen­shot of how the back­end looks for kartooner.com, includ­ing a smaller ver­sion of the Word­Press logo (note the sec­ond menu, wherein I’ve incor­po­rated tabs):

For those who are inter­ested, or for those who cur­rently don’t use Word­Press, here’s a page with screen­shots of the orig­i­nal, straight out of the box interface.