Themeshaper.com Website Review

Follow Kjell Reigstad’s process as he explores designing a block-driven theme with Sketch, for the Gutenberg era. Kjell Reigstad walks through his experience designing a block-powered theme. Last week, Allan Cole and I shared a new Gutenberg-powered theme called process for the theme. At its core, this felt a lot like a typical theme design process, but I did learn a lot about block-based design When Allan and I decided to make this theme, we already had a homepage comp featuring a handful of blocks. That comp did a great job of setting the tone for the design aesthetic. To get things going, I decided to apply that aesthetic to the other default Gutenberg blocks. Working this way was great for a couple reasons. First, it helped me focus — I’d never designed a block-optimized theme before, and this kept my design explorations squarely on the blocks themselves. I thought,  “Gutenberg is all about blocks, right? I’ll design some Second, the Sketch file allowed me to see every single block style in one place. In effect, I was creating a sort of pattern library as I went. I thought this was pretty cool, and figured it’d come in handy later on when we began development. As I got further through these block designs, I realized the need to see all of these individual blocks in context; I’d design a wide-width cover image block, but I had no idea how it’d look in use. So I began dragging blocks around and stacking them up to get a by themselves — they’ll exist within full pages. I needed to design more pages.  My initial homepage design comp introduced a rough idea of a header and an off-centered text column. I began by duplicating that initial page and clearing out all the blocks on it, then pulled together some sample content. Looking at the project through the lens of my imagined client (the band Superserious), I was able to think through examples of blocks and block combinations that might exist on a real site: the columns block to display album information, the table block to display tour dates. This felt much more effective than randomly placing blocks