Introducing the Protean Theme (Beta) for WordPress

Protean is a new theme for WordPress that allows bloggers to customize their website design for individual blog posts. We think it’s a world’s first, and so we decided we’d give it away for free.

You might have noticed that the blog posts here on Building to Think all look a bit different. Some make use of special color schemes; some use background images, yet others use custom fonts.

These features come curtesy of the Protean theme for WordPress—a design experiment I’ve undertaken with the good folks at Landau Reece. The theme is now in beta, and we’ve decided to give it away for free:

Download the Protean theme from Landau Reece

You’ll find more information about the customization features on the Landau Reece website. But before I let you go, I wanted to take a few moments and highlight the concepts, and the people, that inspired Protean.

In no particular order:

  • The rise of HTML5 and CSS3, as well as the release of WordPress 3. These new developments got the cogs spinning, so to speak. We’ve been able to incorporate a number of bleeding-edge features in Protean while still catering to most popular browsers (even IE6).
  • An immense amount of inspiration was also drawn from designers such as Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis who got us thinking about blog-post customization in the first place. (Check out “The Death of the Boring Blog Post” on Smashing Magazine for more information).
  • Last but not least, we’d also like to credit the readability-on-the-web renaissance for the contribution it made to our thinking around design and, well, readability. To learn more, be sure to check out Mandy Brown’s excellent “In Defense of Readers” on A List Apart.

Please note that Protean is in beta and that it features limited functionality. Part of the idea of releasing it so soon is to elicit feedback from people like yourself. So, if you have ideas for improvements or new features, please let us know.