Upstart Blogger Wordpress themes Dark Orange and Dark Pink
The 2 Wordpress themes I am releasing today are the first dark themes, having light text on a dark background, ever released here at Upstart Blogger. I’ve wanted to stray to the dark side for a little while now, experimenting with darker palettes using Genesis Red on my personal blog Brass Revolver and a light on dark design at Enormous Reloaded.
Dark designs are often labelled, wrongly, as difficult to read. The cold hard truth is that dark designs only play havok with your eyes if the dark background is too dark, the contrast is too high, the typography is too aggressive and the browser and operating system have sub standard rendering.
What this means is that a medium contrast palette can look wonderful on a correctly configured browser. Gleaming white text on a solid black background viewed on Internet Explorer will burn your retinas but correctly shadowed creamy off white text on a dark chocolate background viewed on Safari will make your soul smile.
The devil, as always, is in the detail.
With all that in mind here are 2 themes that use a dark chocolate background with creamy off white text, delicately shadowed using webkit CSS, with links and highlights in 2 shades of orange for the first theme, or pink for the second.
Both themes contain a range of banners for use with the Upstart Blogger affiliate program. As with my previous theme, these banners are not installed by default and are simply included for your use if you wish to make money with the Upstart Blogger affiliate program.
The above screenshots show the themes with the optional Genesis Rocket header banner in place for use with the Upstart Blogger affiliate program. This can be used to promote anything you like, replaced with a banner of your choice, or replaced with a traditional header image.
Alternatively this banner can be replaced or complimented with a range of sidebar banners, as shown in the screenshot for Prime, the theme I released yesterday.
Dark Pink and Dark Orange require Wordpress 2.8 or higher and have widget enabled sidebars.
my blue eyes are sensitive to light so I hear ya there… I myself, do prefer the darker background with a cream colored lettering…and yes you can screw it up where it becomes too hard to read and a literal pain on the eyes! Thx for the post…. most people don’t realize the importance of color on a website…especially if your on the computer a lot! A subtle tip of mktg! :-)
Good Morning Ashley. Check out the dark orange theme here.
http://www.totaltwit.net/new-theme-dark-orange/
Ashley, those 2 themes are things of beauty.
Although I love my customised version of Genesis Red, one of these may be more suitable for my blog.. definitely gonna give them a try. Thanks for releasing these great themes.
I LOVE the new designs Ashley! It’s very exciting to see what is possible using Genesis Rocket as a vehicle.
Thanks for always over delivering with your content!
Rocket Girl
Will be installing this at http://www.pinoygg.com :) Good thing I;m restarting my blog and came over this post :D
Done installing darkOrange at Pinoygg.com :)