Category Archives: Design
Oct 17, 2013 by Matt | Posted in Design, Featured
Need a stylish new design for your Ghost blog? Looking for something that puts your content first, with an emphasis on reducing eye strain? Allow me to introduce my new theme (which is technically a port of the one I made for Jekyll), based on the Solarized color palette. It includes stylesheets for the default light-on-dark version, and for the alternate dark-on-light one.
The theme is responsive, with a little bit of JavaScript that collapses the left navigation into a <select> box on mobile-sized displays. It supports both uploadable logos (which replace them text-based heading at the top) and cover images, which appear at the very top of the page. Your author bio and profile picture appear in the sidebar when viewing a post page, as well.
Installing the Theme
- Download it here (or clone it on GitHub)
- Upload the
solar directory to your Ghost blog’s content/themes folder.
- Go to the Settings page of the Ghost backend and select
solar from the Theme dropdown. Save the settings.
Be sure to edit the default.hbs template to add or remove any links you want in the navigation list. You’ll probably want to insert the link to your own Twitter profile instead of leaving it as mine, and maybe add your other social networking profiles.
Aug 28
LESS has been a popular way to streamline your CSS-writing for a while now, but fitting it into your workflow isn’t always easy. Some designers use standalone applications like CodeKit or SimpLESS to compile their LESS files into browser-ready CSS, but I prefer a…
Jul 24
There are already plenty of alternatives to plain old Lorem Ipsum text, the ever-popular Hipster Ipsum being just one of many. But what about images? Why use boring grey boxes like the one Placehold.it generates when you could have kittens? That’s right, kittens. Placekitten…
Jul 17
Responsiveness is clearly the future of web design, but one little problem with is advertisements. Ad networks, Google AdSense includes, don’t take kindly to you simply hiding them at lower resolutions with display: none and calling it a day, since the ads still load…
Jun 19
I’ve been having fun playing around with Jekyll and Ruby lately, which has lead to a sudden increase in the number of repositories on my GitHub profile. After converting my personal blog and porting its theme over, I thought it would be fun to…
May 15
It’s been ten years since CSS Zen Garden launched with its goal to excite and inspire people to build creative designs with the much more limited tools CSS offered at the time. A decade later, it’s back. Given how the CSS landscape has changed…
May 8
At the Adobe MAX conference this week, Adobe announced that they will be discontinuing their Creative Suite products (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) in favor of their subscription-based “Creative Cloud” service. Instead of purchasing the software outright, and upgrading at your leisure, the new system involves…
Apr 3
I recently unearthed a review copy of a book that somehow got lost in the shuffle a couple of years ago, HTML5 and CSS3: Develop with Tomorrow’s Standards Today by Brian P. Hogan, which is too bad, since it’s one of the better books…
Feb 27
There has been a significant backlash against the design concept of skeuomorphism lately. So much that the term has started leaking into the vocabularies of commenters on tech blogs. Users are calling for Jonathan Ive, as the new leader of human interface design at…
Dec 12
It’s weird. Practically overnight, several major blogs rolled out similar redesigns that follow this emerging trend that Usability Post has documented. Suddenly, Mashable, The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb all have new designs that feature prominent top bars (which are primarily statically positioned), responsive designs…
