Once a month at WebDevStudios we dedicate an entire day to giving back to the open-source community. It’s called “Five for the Future” or #5FTF. Contributions can be done through bug fixes on open-source projects, answering questions on forums, providing translation services for projects and even building our own project from scratch.

I used my time this month to work on my open-source WordPress theme that I call “Easy Journal”. My idea with this theme is provide a highly readable theme to the front-end user. A lot of what I’m doing isn’t super fancy. I’m trying to boil the design down to something fairly elegant and I’m off to decent start. I’m also “eating my own dog food” as they say, by running this theme on this website. As my project improves, my website improves.

Today I focused on the design of the theme and made a bunch of text and other style adjustments. I also switch the colors up to black, white, purple and an electric pink. I did have more natural colors, but I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. Ultimately though I want these to be controllable via the theme options. I was think it would be could to even have some preset color scheme options. So instead of picking each color, you can just select a scheme or collection of colors.

Before I got started developing this morning, I sketched some layouts and jotted down some notes. I found this oddly refreshing, just to pound out some ideas real quick.