Corporate Agency

Corporate Agency is where the flat-design run in this catalogue starts. Released in December 2013, it drops the gradients, bevels and drop shadows every theme before it used to signal that something was a button, and replaces them with flat colour, weight and spacing. Venture and Multipurpose, published six and nine months later, are built on the same vocabulary.

Underneath the restyle it is a conventional business and portfolio theme: twelve block regions, a one- or two-column layout, multi-level multilingual drop-down menus, and a captioned FlexSlider front page. Like the rest of the 2013–2014 group it requires jQuery Update configured to 1.8.

Flat design was genuinely harder to build than the style it replaced, for a reason worth stating. A gradient and a shadow do the work of telling a visitor that something is pressable; remove them and that information has to be carried entirely by size, colour contrast, spacing and position. Get it slightly wrong and the site is not merely plainer, it is unusable — people cannot find the button. Most of the build time went into affordance, not aesthetics.

One release, and around 150 sites still reporting. It was superseded quickly by its own descendants, which is a reasonable fate for a theme whose main contribution was establishing a direction.