A few days ago I decided to start
working on a new theme for Zap. At first I thought I'd just write schemes for Redbasic (the default theme), but as the CSS files grew bigger and bigger, it appeared that creating a new theme was more relevant. I ended up with something rather similar to Redbasic, perhaps just a little less austere:
After creating four schemes with a light background, I thought it could be a good idea to have something a little darker. I can't remember why, but I decided to work on schemes based on single color, starting with green:
This reminded me of the old monitors that were in use decades ago when I was still a kid. I thought that adding some kind of blurry effect would really be nice to improve this "retro" look, but had no idea on how to do that. If only it could be just as easy as editing a CSS file to get the colors your want...
Turns out it is:
I could have stopped there. I mean how further could you go? Rendering the images in black & green monochrome was the only missing thing to make it a really vintage theme. But doing this using the CSS filters seemed rather unlikely.
Or did it?
It took me a few hours, but I must say I'm quite satisfied with the result. Which doesn't mean some important changes can't still be made. For instance I don't know if using a different font would be a useful addition. Switching to an even more old school one seemed like a good idea, but maybe it is too much:
Anyhow, I now have three variations of this theme: Green, Orange and Black & White. All of theme have some schemes that allow you to be more or less "radical" in terms of aspect.
As I'm proud enough to think that maybe a person or two could be interested in using those themes, I made them available throught a
git repo. Though I consider them to be usable on a daily basis, some improvements are certainly possible: for example the CSS files are awfully messy, the few PHP lines I wrote probably need to be reviewed and/or rewritten by people who know what they're doing, and so on...
So, I will dare to ask: any comments on this?
P.S.: The git repo is named
Zap_Themes, the themes are most probably also usable with Roadhouse, Misty and perhaps Osada and Redmatrix. With a little extra work it may be possible to use them with Hubzilla.
