Akai Premium Theme from Crimson Pear

Screenshot of Akai premium wordpress blog theme

I’m so excited to share with you what I’ve been toiling away at for the last couple of weeks. This is my Akai (means red in Japanese) self-hosted WordPress blog theme that you can purchase over on my Crimson Pear site.

This was such fun to create. I had the Indian inspired block prints and Henna Mehnhi medallions swirling around my head for weeks – I love medallions. It took a while for me to put them to use but this is usually my approach, I almost map it all out in my head first before I sit down in front of Photoshop. I like this approach although I do set myself up for coding challenges when I finally cut it up to CSS. The little flag showing the date was my road block this time, more the date than the flag, and it was also one of the things that wouldn’t play nice in IE9. The other was the hover on the menu.

These colours are so strange for me and they are not at all what I set out to use but this gorgeous photo called Spread your love everywhere you go from Melissa Deakin Photography just seem to guide my design. Doesn’t it make you want to go to the beach?

So for the geeks out there if you’re interested – it’s built as a child theme on the Thematic Theme Framework – which I love to use. The title and tagline are driven by WordPress Site Title and Tagline under General settings with the option to override with a logo image. The comments are styled so people who comment can quickly see when the author replies to one of their comments. It makes use of a lot of CSS3 so things like rounded corners don’t work in IE but degrade gracefully.

Let me know if you see it being used because I would just love to see this on someone’s blog.


Comments

4 responses to “Akai Premium Theme from Crimson Pear”

  1. You are so talented! This is beautiful. Simply beautiful. Understated to a T.

    I don’t understand any of the technical stuff, but I’m glad you’re having fun with it.

  2. This is sooo Gorgeous, Libby!

  3. Oh, Libby, it’s so pretty! I know these aren’t colors you immediately gravitate to, but they are SO right up my alley. Even the wood background is fresh – I love the whitewashed look. And the fun date detail!! Loooove.

  4. […] been working on a new blog design and it’s not coming together as well as my Akai theme did. I felt like it needed ‘something’ but I couldn’t define what that […]

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