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

steampunk 1


    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.