16 Apr 09 Arthemia Theme is irritating

I hate bad design. I don’t mean bad colours (although that isn’t pleasant  I see that as styling as distinct from design). Most of all I hate convoluted and complicated things that are passed off as user-centred.

Since I was driving user-centric design ten years ago when the rest of the world was arguing whether hyperlinks should be blue or just underlined, I feel strongly about design and partially responsible for the the way design has largely prevailed in the face of technical developers and their database inhibited twaddle.

But every now and then, like this month while experimenting with some news style  themes for a project, I came across Arthemia. There is a lovely free version which I thought I would try, not that I object to premium themes, we all have to make a living and theme designers should be congratulated for crafting really good looking themes and have every right  charge for them. But this Arthemia theme is driving me mad. It has a custom field setting to drop images into feature stories such as this headline story and it just does not work. There is scant documentation and what there is has been followed to the letter but is just does not work – shame really. I would have bought it, but instead I am giving it a load of bad press.