When I standardized on the Genesis framework almost two years ago (from the date of the talk), I figured it was a good investment in a set of child themes I could endlessly redesign to match client branding. The CSS was well-organized, and I could indulge my first love, typography, and new themes would be coming out all the time. What I didn’t count on was that I would also learn the functions well enough to build child themes of my own, almost by osmosis. (And, I admit, some time learning about the code. But don’t ask me to pass a test!) Now I’m mixing and matching templates and functionality from one child theme to another, and from plugins, building sites with style I haven’t thought to achieve since I started with WP and with functionality I never thought I could achieve in any way at all. Granted, I chose Genesis – but I feel sure you can do the same thing with another framework, like Thesis, for example, or Headway. Because the more familiar you get with a body of code, as a designer stepping over the line into development, the easier it is to reincorporate that original visual sense you brought to the party into the newer skillset you’re developing. And as you probably realize from the rest of your design career, constraints are what set you free to come up with novel solutions. In the body, I’ll start with some sites based on Genesis child themes – show the stylesheets and how they’re the same from theme to theme. Then I’ll move into some more recent work that combines themes, like http:\/\/frontenactennis.com – and talk about adding mobile-first design instead of just sticking to the child themes’ responsive CSS. For instance: http:\/\/tennis-booker.com, a custom Genesis theme that’s also based on 320 and up. By July, I’ll also probably have some experience with SASS, which ought to make the 320andup styling process less tedious. I’ll also weave throughout the talk my preference for self-hosted @font-face typography over hosted services. I’m kind of a typography nut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I standardized on the Genesis framework almost two years ago (from the date of the talk), I figured it was a good investment in a set of child themes I could endlessly redesign to match client branding. The CSS was well-organized, and I could indulge my first love, typography, and new themes would be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1143304,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wcpt_session_time":0,"_wcpt_session_duration":3000,"_wcpt_session_type":"","_wcpt_session_slides":"","_wcpt_session_video":"","_wcpt_speaker_id":[346],"footnotes":""},"session_track":[],"session_category":[],"class_list":["post-398","wcb_session","type-wcb_session","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2YmUJ-6q","session_date_time":{"date":"","time":""},"session_speakers":[{"id":"346","slug":"mary-baum","name":"Mary Baum","link":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/speaker\/mary-baum\/"}],"session_cats_rendered":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/wcb_session"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1143304"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/398\/revisions\/465"}],"speakers":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/speakers\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wcb_track","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_track?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"wcb_session_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/columbus.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_category?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}