Theme-ify-ing

After last week's design bust, our team decided to go with the idea of creating and applying custom themes that would run across all pages in the site, rather than customizing each page individually. One member in our group already had this sort of thing going on, and it was working rather nicely, but the only problem for me was that the color scheme wasn't quite to my taste. Perhaps I just have a strange taste in design (which I probably do), but I would still like to go with an extremely simple, lightly-colored theme for the site.

Once I got my files set up correctly with all the HTML files pointing to a common theme.css file, I was ready to get down to business and find a color scheme that I really liked. At first, it seemed pretty simple, just picking colors that looked nice to me and applying them to the page. But of course, as I should have known, it's never that easy. What looks nice as a color doesn't necessarily look nice on a page, and once you get to the point of combining colors, things get quite disastrous and you enter this infinite loop of:
                       while (ugly) {
                         pick (color)
                       }
for what seems like forever. Even when using a color scheme generator, it was difficult to get it just right for our site. A little color goes a long way, and even the least-saturated colors seem to be too much.

Although I'm not very satisfied with it, the current theme that I have is what I would call a "tree" theme. As I was playing with greens and browns for that au naturel look, a branch struck me in the face and made me realize, "I should make this page emulate the look of a tree!" We had to get rid of the foliage-rich backgrounds, but who said we couldn't integrate them into the pages' components themselves? Starting from the bottom, the widgets are the brown "tree trunks", and as you work your way to the top, you transition into the green leaves that lighten up as you get towards the "canopy". Some of the widgets are quite tall, so even more so I thought it was appropriate to apply this sort of color scheme. While it doesn't exactly look appealing, the idea is pretty neat (in my opinion), and I would very much like to keep working at this for a little while longer to see if I can get a really clean and nice looking theme. Part of the issues I had were due to structural limitations with the page, so if I want it to look really nice, then I might have to do some major reconstruction across all the pages.

Surely enough, progress is indeed being made, but hopefully this portion will round off soon so that we can get back to the fun stuff: the responsive layout of the pages!