Just going to go with the basics here in order to get the template set up for the other sites. Color scheme should be straightforward, typography the same. Only real design decision is menu placement, sidebar(s) and dual-pane layout.
Used to get all involved with complementary colors and all that but for this websafe palette with good contrast should suffice. No point in wasting time on a font face at this point although line spacing and such will need to be tweaked. Menu placement and sidebar are, as always, critical choices for both appearance and usability, might need to research current best practices before pulling the trigger on any given configuration.
Might as well try a plugin to get the colors set. Should save a bit of time and make modification that much easier. Once again, can’t get sidetracked with minutiae but checking out various CSS combinations can be really tedious.
First plugin looking good is “Awesome Color Palettes” which uses shortcodes to control the color scheme. Hasn’t been updated in 10 months or tested past 5.7.5 (cuurently on 5.8.3) but worth a shot. And … complete wash, just generates a palette for the page and demo page just has a bunch of dumb videos, no sample.
Not wasting any more time. Went to coolers.co and tweaked a palette with red, blue and purple values – good enough for now. There’s the pattern of course but overall this should get me rolling.
R -> FF000F; B -> 0F00FF; P -> 7722BB
Easy enough and I definitely like that shade of purple (“French” according to the site). Wonder how it would look with red and blue font colors. Probably best to stick with basic black for the font and use those other colors for highlights. Actually, with the dark background that white font is pretty nice, keeping for now.
As for typography, the defaults seem fine for now. Looks like 1.5 line spacing is already set up, the face is acceptable and not up for messing with the CSS. Last step is the layout then create a child theme to lock it all in and figure out how to clone / export to the other sites.
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