Help for Theme designers
Design themes for Exponential: designs and overrides, templates, stylesheets and assets, packaging a theme and keeping it current.
44 pages
Start here
Read these pages in this order.
- Theme designers: start here The landing page for theme designers - what this section adds to the designer help, a task-to-page index th...
- Your first day as a theme designer A plan for the first working day of a theme designer new to Exponential - looking at a real site with the r...
- Reading paths for theme designers Ordered reading lists for theme designers by situation - visual designers who do not code, designers who wr...
- How Exponential themes differ For theme designers who have built themes for other systems. The six ideas that make an Exponential theme d...
- From mockup to theme The workflow from a design in a design tool to a working Exponential theme - seven stages, who does what in...
- Mapping a design to content classes How theme designers turn mockups into a map of content classes, fields and view modes - reading a class, wh...
Good to know
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Show your theme as a live static demo
Put your Exponential theme in front of clients and users as a live demo site on GitHub Pages, free and always up, with example content and a link to the theme's repository.
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Make a free website in 15 minutes
The tutorial - from an existing Exponential site to a live github.io address in about 15 minutes, with a free GitHub account, one token, the setup wizard, a build, a check and a publish.
Search by topic
Each button lists the pages of one topic for Theme designers.
Key pages
All pages for Theme designers- Designing with real content Why and how theme designers draw with the content an Exponential site really holds - where to get it, how to measure the extremes, a set...
- Designing for editors Design rules that keep an Exponential theme working when editors, not designers, fill it - variable text length, optional fields, images...
- Designing view modes How theme designers plan the views of each content class - full, line, embed, embed-inline and custom modes such as card - with a view ma...
- Designing content listings and cards How theme designers design lists, grids and cards for Exponential content - folder lists, mixed classes in one list, sort order set by ed...
- Component inventory How theme designers keep an inventory of the components of an Exponential theme - what counts as a component, a template for each entry w...
- Building a style guide page How to build a living style guide inside an Exponential theme - a page that shows every token and component with the theme's real templat...
- Type scale How theme designers choose a type scale for an Exponential theme and turn it into tokens - a small number of steps, fluid sizes with clam...
- Spacing and grid How theme designers define spacing and a layout grid for an Exponential theme - one spacing scale as tokens, space inside and between com...
- Color palettes and ramps How theme designers build a color palette for an Exponential theme - brand colors, ramps of tints and shades, role tokens chosen from the...
- From design tool variables to CSS custom properties How to carry the variables of a design tool (colors, sizes, spacing, modes) into the token stylesheet of an Exponential theme - one namin...
Related audiences
Free documentation: use it to help yourself and others
This help is free documentation, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or later. You may use it, share it and improve it:
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