40×41 is presently profiting plenty from the ‘press prowess of Caroline Moore. She’s a WordPress themer who who seems to favor creative, whimsical, relatively simple (in the sense of unnecessarily cluttered) user interfaces. I fumbled upon Spun a while back and snatched it up. Made it mine-ish, and I still feel that it’s almost the perfect theme for this project right out of the box. Some fine tuning still needed before I’m totally smitten, but the best option I’ve come across. By a long shot!

Theme Dreams

So what is my one-day-some-day wish list for a 40×41 theme? I imagine a minimalist, responsive portfolio theme. A sketchbook, scrapbook, notebook, only digital. No contrivances. Lots of empty. Lots of blank. A crisp and clean context to showcase smudged, crumbled, patina’ed artifacts. A digital studio for analog content. A subtle stage for unsubtle acts.

Adapting Spun might start with getting rid of the orbs on the homepage. Something that allows for the irregular dimensions of the images. Maybe even the tiled mosaic option that Jetpack offers. Something like this…

That has potential. Images are too tight. Too large. But the concept could work. I’m not wild about the structure that the circle cropping imposes. I’d prefer something looser, more casual.

Deep Thoughts

What else? I love the subtlety of the links in this theme. But they vanish on the page. Even after creating a post I don’t pick up on the links. I’d like to figure out a simple but elegant solution to that problem.

I’d also like to figure out how to remove the featured image from the top of the image (customer format) posts. Not sure why/how that’s helpful. Feels redundant. Clunky. But maybe I’m not using it optimally. Or even properly?It’s probably an easy tweak for a WordPress geek but I’m a bit dense in this department.

In a similar vein, I’d like to fine tune the post format options. I’d like to add an audio (custom format) option. And I’d like to figure out how better to present these. Quote (custom format) renders too large. Some other custom formats drop title. Etc. Need to think more about what would best suit the project…

Crowdsource?

I’d like to know what you think. If you could tune-up 40×41‘s theme in any way that you wanted, what would you do? Click the plus sign in the comment graphic below to add a reply. All tweak recommendations welcome and acknowledged! :) Thanks.