I have always wanted to design my own theme, while I love the random sarah theme now, I find from time to time I just get the itch for a redesign! Looking through the thousands of wordpress themes out there can be daunting, and if you have been reading random sarah for long enough you know what I went through when choosing a theme last time.

You will like a part of one, and a part of another one, and so on. You get to the point where you want to build it yourself (or in my case at least design what it will look like)

I cannot code for my life! This is a fact. But I consider myself to be a pretty good designer. So I wanted to know if it was possible for me to design what it looked like and how all the buttons would work, and someone else just code it for me. I have a few friends who are willing to help me out with this once the design is finished, so I started to build! You can watch the full evolution of the theme on flickr (I posted a link to the set below) I have been posting screen shots as I go along and getting feedback from my twitter peeps on how it looks.

The whole idea for the theme started with a set of free icons I found on Spoon Graphics of hand drawn icons for bloggers. I have seen a lot of hand drawn web design and it’s an aesthetic I like. So I decided to look around the web for some great blogs and find inspiration. Another important step was using iStockPhoto to get great art I could tear apart and use for the design. I got the background image and most of the other artwork from there. TIP: YOUR DESIGN WILL LOOK BETTER IF YOU SPEND A LITTLE MONEY!

So here is where I am so far, I would be happy to answer any questions about how I did this, it really wasn’t that hard. (and it’s not done yet!)