Build for Arkamonta Designs

Starting from a clean slate was easy with the Intentionally Blank theme. This gave me almost limitless possibilities for customization.

Utilizing the Foundation 6 framework and the magic of SASS – AD Pryzm is a dark theme that uses a single color value to brighten the darkness.

The color is mapped to filters that produce different shades of the color which are used throughout the site.

These different shades are used in different elements all the way down to the “white” value that gets used. It’s not exactly white – but is actually the chosen color lightened to near-whiteness.

The site also features a bit of a parallax effect using fixed background images. This causes the background to appear as layered panels that seem to slide above each other.

By alternating between patterns and large images -the effect is quite good.

The site also uses semi-transparent images that are laid over the chosen color to achieve some of the effects you see.

The cloud layer on the home page is made of four layers of semi-transparent clouds. Two of these layers are simply images – chosen at random from a pool of four images. The other two cloud layers are dynamically generated when the page loads and are tinted with the chosen color.

These four layers are then sandwiched between a background “fog” layer and a foreground “desert” layer. The end result is that each time the page loads – the clouds in the sky appear to be unique – the effect is definitely subtle – but interesting to note.

The theme also relies on a custom plugin written by me specifically for this theme. The plugin is called AD Pryzm Blocks – and as the name suggests – it adds a couple of Blocks to the WordPress editor. These blocks help control the layout and power the parallax effects.