The Vostok Theme has become quite popular during this late year, especially after WordPress decided to bundle it by default with new installations. However some people have publicly expressed criticism about it. They’ve said it’s “boring”, that they find it “dull” or “bland”.
I say they are right.
We agree that it’s a boring theme but we’d rather call it NEUTRAL. It’s neutral, it doesn’t have a soul. It has no personality. Why?
The message shouldn’t be in the container but in the content itself. If a blog that uses the Vostok Theme is boring it’s probably because the content is boring. It has nothing to do with the “design”. The Vostok Theme is neutral because it let’s the content speak for itself. It’s your writing, your pictures and your editorial style what makes a blog interesting.
If you focus more on pictures you’d probably pick the dark version because photos contrast with the background and thus are more vivid. If you want text to be king you’ll pick the white one wich is better in terms of legibility.
To those who say that the Vostok Theme is boring I reply: yes, but it’s because of your content. And if your content is boring it really doesn’t matter which theme you use, it will always be boring. You may go for a colorful, fancy schmancy theme and catch the visitor’s attention for some seconds but if your stuff is dull… you are perceived as dull.
The Vostok Theme is neutral, it lets your content speak for itself. There is no make up, just legibility and clarity. It’s an honest theme.
From Griffith to David Fincher, this beautiful post on how film titles have evolved throughout cinema’s history is a pertinent reminder of the importance of images, typography and narrative to create specific atmospheres.
[In] film titles we see the bond between the art of filmmaking and graphic design — and perhaps visual culture as a whole. They have always served a greater purpose than themselves: to move the overarching story forward.
We believe that Planetaki‘s stress-free stream of information approach is what makes it so versatile. If you give Planetaki any other creative uses, drop us a line.
Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros, has come up with a beautiful way to convey information through images. Add music –Bach in this case– and you have a documentary: not a narrative documentary but a powerful visual documentary. It’s called Sounds + Vision: At War.
In his own words:
The music amplifies the pictures, and the pictures amplify and clarify the music. It’s a way to get a really large amount of information in pictures and music to people in a way that is very intuitive and easy to absorb.
-Chris Hondros
You can read more about it in the NYT’s Lens blog.
Tumblr users can now dress elegant and stylish either in black or white since both versions of the Vostok Theme are available for them. Ricardo Fernández coded them and we included them on the Vostok Theme page along with the css files for comments in case you manage them with Disqus. Ain’t that nice?
Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares. (It’s like asking how many NYT articles you haven’t read. It would be gargantuan. I don’t bother you with the number of Scripting News posts you haven’t read, so why does Google?)
We just released a white version of our very succesful Vostok Theme for WordPress, along with some slight changes in typography and size to fit these modern times we are going through:
The best thing about it is that you don’t need to chose beforehand, you just install one file and BOOM! Both themes appear on your WordPress so you can fit them both and chose one right away.
Remember, Vostok Theme is for those who don’t want attention to be distracted from content. Colors and typography have been carefully chosen to achieve maximum legibility with minimum eye fatigue. Also, code has been written with extreme care for web standards and accessibility.
NOTE TO TUMBLR USERS: Ricardo Fernández just made an adaptation and now you have the Vostok Theme for Tumblr available in black (white soon to come).
