Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Typography used to be something that was often overlooked on the internet. You would have your basic amount of fonts that were deemed “web safe”, and you would have to work with that if you wanted your website to work on all browsers and operating systems.

Well, soon there came ways of inserting your own fonts via Javascript with technologies such as typeface.js and cufón to name a couple. Well, cufón is what we at SlackrMedia and SlackrThemes are going to be adopting into our themes to help make our themes as gorgeous and appealing as possible.

I know a lot of people “in the know” might be asking why we are choosing Javascript over the CSS3 @font-face attribute. Well, as the @font-face attribute isn’t supported by every browser and operating system at the moment, we decided that we can wait until the time has come to fully incorporate it into our themes. Don’t worry though, the cufón Javascript is very minimal and will not lower speed times noticeably on your site when using one of our themes.

The “Spettro” theme that we have created and published previously worked. It had a sidebar, a nice full background image, and a big header image. Well, it was too blah for us. So, if you haven’t already been able to tell from the homepage, we have completely updated the theme in terms of design.

Almost all of the underlying code is the same except for the dimensions of parts, colors for backgrounds, but that’s about it. I think that it looks a lot better, and with the added fonts via Cufon and the options page, it works just as well.

Above you can check out the screenshot of the “NEW” Spettro theme, and you can download and give it a test run here.

Yes, as you can see in the image above or on the homepage of SlackrThemes, options panels will now be standard on every single WordPress theme that we make.

I have always wanted to make options panels for the themes but never really looked into it that much until a tutorial came up on Nettuts+ about how to create one. As you can see we have implemented just that options page with many more features and some modifications, but that is where I can give credit right now.

The only thing is that I am not going to be keeping that options panel for too long. I am implementing it as a fix for the lack-of an options panel, but will be customizing it and modifying it to make it our own and hopefully make it look and work exactly the way we want it to. It might not be as pretty as Elegant Themes’ ePanel, but it gets the job done.

So that’s about it. All themes have been updated and you can now download the theme with the options panel and try it out for yourself. Each theme has also been updated with little modifications here and there which you can check out as well.

As you should already be able to tell by now, SlackrThemes has got completely revamped in terms of design. I myself don’t have much time on my hand so I chose a theme from ThemeForest called Expose Gallery and was designed by www.kriesi.at/. The theme allows for a lot of flexibility on the backend of things, and on the front end appearance, it works seamlessly into the site that I am looking at creating.

That’s not the only big announcement, but I’ll save the other one for when everything surrounding it is completely done. For now though, enjoy the new design, tell me what you think about it, and check out the themes we have to offer!