I came up with the title “Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve” late one night after a long period of thinking about how I could focus my writing. From that, a new theme was needed for the site to try to emphasise this idea; both to demonstrate visually that a change had taken place, and also to address the shortcomings in the previous theme, dubbed “Biggs-Theme 0.1″ for want of a better name. The old theme hadn’t been as visually snappy as it could have been, and was also lacking in some areas where I hadn’t had time to do a proper job, such as the sections dealing with comments. And so, the “Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve” theme was born.

The theme takes as inspiration a selection of previous material, primarily the Minima Black theme for Blogger by Douglas Bowman; also neuro’s Back in Black theme series; the WordPress 1.5 default theme; and Borja Fernandez’s Pool theme. Once I had the idea, it only took three or four days to complete – though there is a lot on the page, the code is far less complex than previous efforts of mine. It’s also fairly standards-compliant, uses only two tables, and only a handful of small images.

The images used are all original – the title being of course inspired by Ralph Steadman’s timeless illustrations and titling for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” emulated with a ballpoint on to notepaper in the dark by myself late one sleepless night, scanned, and edited to death in Photoshop. The “spatters” that precede each post and comment are original Photoshop doodles in the same style, using the standard spatter brushes and spatter filter.

The banner-like images that appear under each post are randomly selected from a set of crop-outs from photos of mine. They, and many others, can be viewed on my deviantART page.

The only font used in the theme is Trebuchet MS, defaulting to Trebuchet, Verdana, then the basic sans-serif family. This was chosen after I saw the punchy capitalisation effects of Minima Black and wanted to replicate them. It looks good large and small, is widely available, and makes for nice small-text effects.

Features present in Biggs-Theme 0.1 that haven’t made it into this theme include the Chatbox, which may make a re-appearance if I can come up with a way of integrating it nicely; also the BOFHcam, for which this is also true.

Since the theme was made to fit the new “mode” for my site, it will not be distributed, but source code is available to anyone who asks. Enjoy!