One day, during a mild bout of insomnia, I decided to play around with a redesign of The Tangential. I liked the old theme but I spend so much time sitting on Siteinspire that I wanted a pretty grid and a more spaced-out layout. I put together something I liked on inDesign, something with a lot more functionality – a top nav, a sidebar that could fit more than text, a scroll view – and decided to see if I could make it myself.
The last design of The Tangential was basically the WP Shower theme Suburbia with the colors changed and our own iconography/ fonts, but I wanted something more custom. I tried to build it from the ground up, but results were laughable. I ended up grabbing the most feature-rich WPShower theme, Sight, and deciding to work from there. I reskinned it to look very different, but if you are familiar with it you notice that many of its features are there.
I don’t have much PHP or CSS experience other than messing around with Tumblr themes, but once I get an idea in my head I want to do it as fast as possible. After a few mild nervous breakdowns that required whiskey + ginger ale, I had it at least passable. I ended up getting it mostly done in about 4 days, although a few kinks remained that I’ve since dealth with. I ended up getting a lot more comfortable with PHP, so I built on writer, category, tag and 404 error pages. I also customized the theme for Philolzophy and The Sport Hole. I’m sure that in the next 6 months or so I’ll impulsively redesign it again. Web trends change fast.
