Noticing Theme - Or: My 8th Grade English Teacher Would Be So Proud

When you're writing a book/story, theme is one of the many elements you have to consider. Theme, when done well, is multi-layered, and quite nuanced. Boiled down to its essence though, theme can be compared to 'the moral of the story'. It's the undercurrent that runs throughout a work and ties all the interwoven strands together into one unified piece.

Design wise, it serves much the same purpose. Think of the themes you use on your computer or smart phone. Changing the "theme" of your devices usually means changing the color scheme, using similarly styled icons (which match or contrast the color scheme), and changing the default fonts of your various programs to something that "fits" as well. The theme of the design becomes the overall "look" of the design, which is very important since its usually the first impression the audience receives.

Fortunately for the average blog user, they have a lot of help when it comes to designing/implementing an effective theme. To illustrate my point this week, I went ahead and changed my theme.  Same basic three box layout, but different colors, different background design, and different font. It took all of 10 seconds to achieve this.

I went into settings, found the layouts tab, and selected a new, pre-made layout/theme, then clicked save. And just like that I have a new look for my blog.

Of course, one has to consider the effectiveness of the change. Are orange, pink, and yellow swirls the image I want for my blog? Do they line up with my goals or my target audience? Since the goal was simply to illustrate how easy it is to change a blog theme, I'd say yes. The multi-colored, somewhat whimsical design wouldn't exactly be appropriate in a professional setting however. If I was looking for that kind of theme, I'd simply search the library of themes provided by Blogspot and pick one that suited.

Then, usually, these free themes allow customization to arrange text and colors and photos to where you want them, without any programming knowledge required. Wordpress has an impressive range of free themes that fit a wide range of blog genres and audiences. An even larger library if you want to pay a subscription fee.

Search for "Free blog templates" and then get ready to spend hours upon hours combing through the results to pick out ones your like - IMG SRC: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3458/3276330998_f90af59e71.jpg?v=0

The sheer number of themes out there, along with the amount of time one might spend to adjust their free theme "jussssst right" is proof of just how important the packaging/presentation of information actually is. Both those things are also evidence of just how easy it is to lose sight of the fact that how information looks is, at most, only half the battle. After all, readers aren't going to stick around for the moral of the story if everything else isn't up to par. Just like people aren't going to care about how pretty your blog looks if you don't have interesting content.