Eco Theme on Roller - Part II
Tuesday Feb 06, 2007
OK - so we did our quiet launch of our eco theme for Roller this week. I say quiet because it's tricky to release a new blog theme to an online community and expect anyone to try it out, even if it's totally free. If we made a big internal announcement who knows if we'd get any "switchers" at all. They may not like the announcement, or not like be told or encouraged to try a new theme. At the same time, if you don't tell them, how are they going to know, except for word of mouth? Or online chatter?
The inspiration for this entry is an entry I read about Blogger.com by the designers who redesigned the entire blog. Stop Design. I was impressed by how open and honest -- and technical -- they were on how they designed it.
First, it's a big commitment to switch themes, particularly for active bloggers. There are the issue of unknowns. Unknown bugs. Unknown reaction from your readers - this is a biggie, particularly if you've got tens of thousands of readers like some Sun bloggers have. Maybe you've lost some of those hacks you did on your old theme. There's also the unknown unknowns, which can be very stressful :)
When 'shopping' for a new theme, you can ask yourself, does this blog theme really speak to me? Does it represent?
There is also the design theory that themes shouldn't even exist. After all, unless you're part of a group blog, they're for the most part individual and personal, and therefore you should design your own. And your theme could really define you, so using someone else's theme is just plain scary.
In a previous entry I had promised to provide a bit more information on the theme's creation. We designed this theme because of Sun's commitment to Eco Responsibility, its commitment to its employees, to bloggers, and also Sun's commitment to sharing, openness, and participation. If you know Sun, then you know how committed we are to these listed things above. At the same time, we thought it was time for a new theme for Roller, so we put the two and two together and realized it was the perfect storm - and the perfect time to design a new eco theme.
I am not a designer by trade, so pardon me for not using words like 'design elements', but here's what we essentially set out to do on this theme. As you can see, all of our wishes were pretty subjective in the end.
Keep it very simple
Not be heavy-handed. In other words, not preachy. For instance, go light - don't have very many, if any, images (ie. no trees, leaves, nature, global images, etc.) -- in the end we have NO images at all.
Make it green - but not just any green. We wanted just the right green. That perfect green. As they say, it's not easy finding the right green. Did we find it?
Have it look easy on the eye
Highly functional yet still clean (this was up there on the priority list)
And then, partly in homage to the goal of eco design, we took it a step farther - almost to a more philosophical level. We wanted to truly create an 'eco-friendly' theme, if that was even possible. How the heck do you do that?
So we added these requirements:
Clean (yes, more emphasis on this)
Minimal -- no waste!
Open -- no clutter
Flexible (ie. many uses, many bloggers could use it, or modify it)
Sustainable - that it wasn't going to get dated quickly - ie. would have a relatively long lifespan, like a great product
Actionable - here we added rotating Eco Action
Raise Awareness - here we added rotating Eco Facts
and of course...
Innovative
Did we achieve it? We wanted to make sure that whoever used it was going to be able to change things on it without much difficulty (that remains to be seen).
Sun loves feedback, so let us know what you think. Did we meet our goals?
Thanks to those courageous souls who've already switched though, such as Carolyn's Participate blog, and Mary's amazing Mary Mary blog and a handful of others - you know who you are!
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