Version 1.2 of Moderately Austere, my personal blog WordPress theme, has been released to Github.
What is Moderately Austere?
Moderately Austere is a fork of the Twenty Seventeen WordPress theme. Themes are GPLv2 or later, and forking was the natural way for me to start evolving the theme in new directions (as opposed to starting a theme from scratch).
I initially forked Twenty Seventeen to remove usage of vh units, which causes stuttery scrolling on mobile. I really dislike that phenomenon, and I don’t think the mobile browsers (Chrome and Safari) are going to remove their “resize viewport on scroll” behavior any time soon.
What’s more, I plan to keep making other tweaks over time. Version 1.2 is one such set of tweaks.
What’s new in version 1.2?
See the README.txt for the summary. I want to highlight two changes.
The first highlighted change is adding a CSS box shadow to the logo element. I use the logo to display a square profile image. As you can see in the following image, without the box shadow, the profile image is too flat on the header. With the box shadow, the profile image has a pleasing amount of depth.
The second highlighted change is changing the site font from Libre Franklin to Open Sans. The following image shows that the two fonts are nearly indistinguishable:
Libre Franklin is slightly blurrier. Otherwise, most people won’t notice the difference. I’ve used Open Sans on my earlier pre-Wordpress website projects, and I like it.
So there you have it! For 1.3, I want to tweak the headers (font weight, size, etc), and start exploring a different front page approach.
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