Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

A theme inspired by some steampunk objects and a video. The theme contains dark tones with a more sci-fi feeling than Victorian.

    I like steampunk, and I have been working on a few object for around the house and garden. After seeing the video for “Sleep Isabella” by Abney Park on YouTube, I thought that creating a WordPress theme may be fun. I did go looking for steampunk websites to see what they had done. I did like them, but many seemed to focus on the look of printed material, and I was thinking “what would a steampunk computer interface look like?”. Since seeing the other sites, I do want to create two more steampunk inspired themes. One theme will be closer to Victorian/Edwardian printed material, while the other will be a play on a Biedermeier desk.

    First, if you know me, then you know that I am concerned with eco-issues, and I like the idea of a dark theme to save energy via monitor usage. I focused on using different dark textures with bright highlights. The use of stripes was based on an outfit from one of the singers in the video. I am not the best when it comes to creating web graphics. I opened up Gimp, and started creating collages from some images that I had, so these could be better. I would love to create a better clock icon for the date. Still, I like the results.

   Fonts became an issue. For the next theme in this series, I will work with the @font-face in the stylesheet, and see if I can find more appropriate fonts. For this theme I chose a variety of fonts that are fairly common which I thought worked. Most steampunk sites work around the font situation by placing fonts in the images, but for a free theme, that would mean making a header image with a fixed slogan on it. I wanted users to have their own options. I think that I would add images to this theme.

    The menu bar has drop down submenus. I went with colors that I thought worked well for a dark theme but also reflected some common colors seen in steampunk objects. For visited links, I had the color go gray. For hovered links, I simply went to an itallic font. The brass bar that is seen in the index page is not used for pages or single posts; I thought that would be too much. That image is in a div element, so you can easily add it to those pages if you want.

    Overall, I think this theme works for deign sites or retailers who have a creative edge. I was thinking of developing a design site for objects that I collect after I had created this theme. The dark background does show of images. I saw some retailers who may like this type of theme. I might modify some icon elements to better fit with the specific business.

   Tell me what you think. Does it meet your vision of SteamPunk?

Download the theme.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

2 Responses to “Free WordPress Theme: Steampunk1”