Dark Elegant

Dark Elegant was built for portfolios and agencies who wanted the site to disappear behind the work: a dark 960px canvas, restrained type, and a customisable background image so a studio could put its own texture or photograph behind the whole page. Twelve block regions, a configurable left or right sidebar, and FlexSlider driving the front page.

The background-image setting is the detail I would defend. It is a single theme setting that changes the entire character of a site without touching CSS, and it did more for how different two installs of this theme could look than any amount of granular colour configuration would have. Small, high-leverage settings beat large, fine-grained ones — a lesson that transfers directly to what you expose in a platform's tenant configuration.

The test matrix is the detail that dates it hardest. The project page lists Safari, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and "yes also IE7". Supporting IE7 in 2012 meant no CSS3 selectors you actually wanted, no border-radius, no box-shadow, no rgba, and a separate set of PNG fallbacks for anything with transparency — on a theme whose entire look depended on dark surfaces sitting on top of each other. A meaningful fraction of the build was making the dark palette survive a browser that could not composite it.

Two releases in eleven months, which for a theme with this narrow a brief was about right. Around 270 sites still report using it.