Ahh, Kirby. One of my favorite games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. That little pink guy could eat anything! Alas, this Kirby is not pink. It’s white, black, blue, and has square corners. One of the news bits that came out of the WordPress Developers Chat on January 7th is that Matt Mullenweg is spearheading the creation of the new default theme in WordPress named 2010. This means that the default theme will not be something created by a third party. However, Ian Stewart took the challenge upon creating a default theme and Kirby is his result.
Kirby is clean, simple, and has good typographical elements, all the building blocks of a good theme. I encourage you to check out Ian Stewarts insight into the design process of this theme and then read the feedback he’s received. Although it won’t be the new default theme in WordPress, it sure looks to be a great starting point in place of Kubrick.
At first glance, Kirby seems kind of spartan. But when you download it, look under the hood and kick the tires, you’ll find that a lot of thought went into the theme’s design and functionality. Nice work.
I am curious about the choice of names, though. Is Ian a fan of Durward Kirby (the guy who wanted to sue Bullwinkle) by any chance? 😀
Jack Kirby; iconographer of 20th Century mythology. Also, cartoonist.
Being 30, and having collected comics, I was supprised that anyone didn’t know Jack Kirby, or would’ve guess anyone else 🙂 Guess I’m just a geek, lol
I’m glad to say that I learn something new every day. Sorry for my ignorance. I know it’s a lucrative field, but I stopped collecting comic books nearly 4 decades ago. 🙁
I think Ian is spot on with the 3 principles for design of a default theme. As far as the pic can tell, principle 1 is there. As Thematic has a lot of no. 2 and 3 I don´t worry about seeing them fulfilled either.
Great work!
It’s a shame that Matt’s personal animosity towards the WP design community prevents him from adopting a community-made theme. It would have been an ideal opportunity to prove that wordpress is still an open-source project and not just another Automattic product.
Then again, keeping things inhouse does avoid that awkward moment when the designer of your default theme stops using your software…
yeah, it would be nice to have a better starting point for creating a theme of your own from the default theme then the one thats currently in place.
I don’t even consider a theme though, unless it uses brothercake’s drag and drop javascript sidebar widgets. I can say thats the only real thing I look for in a theme, other then the colors, and sadly, iTheme by mangoOrange is really the only drag and drop theme I’ve seen in many years.., They really should go back to that, because I don’t even consider looking at a theme without that..
but yeah I remember Kurby, wasn’t that long ago for us old fokies approaching 40 over here. lol
what I was just thinking though, as much as can be done with CSS, its too bad brothercake doesn’t come out with a CSS only implementation of drag and drop javascript, because I’m sure it could be done in CSS nowadays. Not that there’s anything wrong with javascript, its just that, javascript on sites takes a long time to load sometimes.