Posts tagged: themes
If you’d like to make a Tumblr theme, my recommendation would be three-fold (none of which necessarily involve photoshop by the way):
1 - Learn HTML and CSS. If you don’t know at least enough of these languages to be dangerous then you’re not going to get very far. The Tumblr theme engine is a beautifully simply thing, but it requires knowledge of the basics.
2 - Read the documentation. It’s very thorough, and it’s the best way to learn. Just have it open right next to your file and refer to it constantly.
3 - Look at someone else’s theme code to see how they put things together. There are a few different ways of making things work, and if you follow someone else’s basic pattern/framework and then change the look with CSS, you’ll save yourself the time of recreating the wheel.
Hope that helps!
If you happen to be using my free and awesome Tumblr theme, Notations, you can put the following in the Custom CSS field of the Advanced tab to make your theme wider and even more glorious for photos:
#Main {width:870px;}
.Post .Photo img {max-width:100%;}
Just pick whatever width seems good to you. Mine is set as indicated and it looks rather smashing I must say. (You’ll want to make sure you have high-res photos turned on—also on the Advanced tab.)
I’ll be making a few other improvements (more options) to the theme one of these days soon, so stay tuned.
Designing a new theme in Tumblr, while AWESOME on so many levels, is incredibly difficult. See, the sample theme that you use in the “customize” interface doesn’t have all the available variables. This is actually understandable, given the number of variables and tags that exist. So what do I do? I use a “testing account”… where I put in every type of post, with tags, etc. to simulate a full blog.
Here’s the problem: every damn time you hit “Save Changes” in the customization interface, you are forced to leave the customization interface! So SAVING is necessary, but such a pain! I’m constantly hitting BACK in the browser to get BACK to the customization UI… waiting for it to load… making tweaks… SAVING… waiting… hoping… returning… waiting… etc. etc. This is really cumbersome.
THE SOLUTION… two buttons: ”Save” and “Save and Close”. SAVE just saves. Duh. “Save and Close”, you guessed it, saves AND closes.
This is a no-brainer.
Am I missing something? Is there a way to do what I’m talking about already??