Theme Graphics Bake Them Remake Them

Graphics are the little touches that make your theme special

Graphics is another place you can really change the look and feel of a blog theme. In case you didn’t know you can replace or tweak those graphics used to trim out a theme. Closely associated with the style.php are the images for the theme. Here to is where you can work some magic to make the theme your own. I often change the images associated with things like buttons, blockquotes, RSS, Dividers, (sidebars, body, header, footer, etc.). The images are stored in a directory inside the theme folder; usually img or images.

Theme graphics can be changed

This is probably the first real directory I open once I download and unzip a theme. I can learn a lot about a blog by looking at the image folder contents.

I will often make a screen shot of this folder opened so I can see the images and their file names. This does two things for me:

1. When I’m reading through the CSS Stylesheet I can see what images are being used where which helps me get a better mental image of what is going on in the theme.
2. I make a list of the ones I want to keep, the ones I want to delete and create my own, the ones I want to modify just a bit.

Then while going through the style.php learning the layout in CSS I make note of those image files and where they are called in the formatting of the blog.   You can make some small changes and additions to these graphic files creating some dramatic changes in the look of your blog.   It is a quick and fairly easy way to customize the theme to your personal taste.

Adding a Header Image

If I’m going to be adding a header image to the theme and one doesn’t exist I’ll put it here or install the rotating image header plugin.

If you are adding a header image to a theme that has one, it is pretty easy to replace if you keep the same dimensions as the one originally with the theme.

As you get more comfortable with CSS Style sheets you will find it easy to add a header image to any theme and even change the size of the theme width to accomodate your image.

Here there is a fine line to be walked.   I’ll cover Header Images in a separate post.