Creative Theme

Creative is a fixed-width business and portfolio theme built on a 978px canvas, with twelve block regions, a configurable left or right sidebar, a jQuery Cycle slideshow, and social links in the header. It was published in September 2012, in the overlap where I was shipping fixed-width themes and responsive ones in the same month depending on what the brief needed.

The 978px number is worth dwelling on because it explains the era. A 978px content area on a 1024px screen leaves room for a scrollbar and a small margin without horizontal scrolling — the arithmetic that produced almost every fixed-width design of that period. Every theme in this catalogue built before mid-2012 is a variation on solving that same equation, and the responsive ones are what happened when the equation stopped having one answer.

Five releases over twelve months, on a single branch. The slideshow again accounted for most of the issue traffic; jQuery Cycle was reliable, but its configuration surface was large enough that installers regularly produced combinations I had never tested.

What survives from Creative is not the layout, which is thoroughly of its time, but the discipline of building something with a single obvious focal point. A business site has one job on its front page, and the design either supports that or negotiates with it.