Hi, people can please advice me how to become a themer? What languages or software do I need to master? What process or path shall I take?
First tool in your arsenal has to be Adobe Photoshop for designing. For coding you have many options depending on what you plan to theme. If you plan to theme a cms such as wordpress, phpnuke, drupal, or joomla you'll wanna make sure you get either dreamweaver or aptana studio. You will also want to learn to design before you even attempt to start theming anything. Its a crutial part of web development. Once your design skills are moderate you can start teaching yourself html/php. If you dont plan to theme a cms then just learn html/css, and theme html based websites. if you plan to theme a cms you have to learn php/html/and css. All are completely necessary and it wont be possible to theme any cms without knowledge of all three. There are many different ways to teach yourself how to code/design. The most popular way is to do as many tutorials as your brain can take. You can also read paid/free ebooks, regular paperback books, and follow online video tutorials. another option would be to pay someone to teach you, or to go to school for it. Whatever works best for you. (I've done all of them) Text Tutorials, Video Tutorials, Paid Ebooks, Free Ebooks, Learned through friends, and learned through school.
Not to be a broken record, but the LAST tool in your arsenal has to be Adobe Photoshop or any other paint program. Starting out with a goof assed picture is putting the cart before the horse. Do yourself a favor, and learn semantic well written HTML, separation of presentation (which goes in CSS) from content (which goes in HTML), and a whole host of other modern techniques. Basically everything I outlined in this post ... and as I've been promoting for nubes, pick up this book, it's one of the few on shelves that isn't filled cover to cover with decade out of date methodologies and bad advice. Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, 2nd Edition by Ian Lloyd. You can get it at sitepoint, most major booksellers carry it, and I've seen it on shelves at local libraries. First learn (from that book or from people who have MODERN skills) to make a website in HTML/CSS, THEN if you want to theme existing web software like wordpress or joomla, you'll need to learn the language those are written in - usually PHP. Anyone starts out telling you to draw pretty pictures in a paint program, you tell them to **** off as they are leading you down the wrong path.
Thanks for the advice, I'll go for that book! And hows your health? Just spend some time relaxing and away from computers, money is not giving you time to live. wish you all the best.
He wants to be a themer. Not a coder. Thats a field that particularly caters to the Graphical end of website development. Stop telling ppl to shy away from designing. its NECESSARY and without it everyone will end up making well coded pieces of plain paper. Like i said... Photoshops a TOOL IN YOUR ARSENAL. The coding is by far the most important part. But without some kind of attractiveness in the THEME. he cannot be a THEMER. So stop telling people to forget designing. Granted. You do need to learn to code, AND learn to design. But the order in which you do this is merely personal preference.
You seem to think that means drawing a pretty picture and walking away. Without the underlying knowledge of what CSS and HTML are capable of, the restrictions and methodologies needed to maintain accessability minimums and graceful degredation, any pretty picture you draw in photoshop is going to be worthless at best.... ... or at worst make the poor scmhuck you finally saddle with turning that picture into a actual CODED template want to kick you in the nertz. I kind of assume that by a 'themer' he meant writing THEMES for PROGRAMS like turdpress or Joomla. That means writing CODE, not drawing pretty pictures that someone else has to spend hours remastering and ripping to shreds to try and shoe-horn content into only to find out the fixed heights and widths of elements drawn are utterly useless for fluid width or even fluid height content or saddle you with font sizes that are an accessability /FAIL/. As I've said, put some CONTENT into semantic markup, design the layout in CSS, THEN start up the paint program to hang images on your design. In that last step using a screencap of the CSS baseline I understand can help the artist - that's how I work with them these days, I give them a screencap of the site finished in HTML/CSS and say "Hang pretty pictures on this, keeping in mind that this needs to be able to grow in width and EVERYTHING in the content area should be able to adjust to dynamic height" Something MOST people who work in PSD from the start go "Wait, what?" which of course is why you see so many smaller sites done in crappy fixed width designs restrictive to people on large screens, useless to people on small screens, undersized fixed metric fonts pissing off the vision impaired and sending them for the zoom when they have the damned OS metric already set, and with things like images for content on elements that contain important keywords with little or nothing in the way of proper fallbacks for things like screen readers and search engines. /FAIL/ hard.
Don't fight over what I want. I just wanted to know how to go about. Because I am fed up with drupal themes. So, was taking a personal challenge to convert fantastic joomla templates to drupal. So in that case code is somewhat similiar to a themer. Because designing part is almost done by someone else, my part is only to understand the underlaying concepts of html, css and template engines used by drupal. I know some of html, but know nothing about css. After learning enough css. I'll go for phptemplate engine one that powers drupal themes. After that just copy paste images and css from joomla template to drupal themes. Thanks for your advice people. Any more suggestions and failures that I might come across, kindly have a discussion over them.
solid knowledge of html and css as an addition to creativity and ps skills usually help very much, as building a theme you need to visualize how your graphic elements will be implemented in the layout.