 What's up, guys? How are you feeling? Great? Just got locked my Mac in a second. So we are going to be talking about design today. And I will share with you some of my experience of running a theme shop, a theme shop called Theme Patio. And I will share with you some insights of designing themes and some mistakes I've made along the way. So hopefully you won't make the same mistakes and save yourself several years of your life. So it all started back in 2011 when I was working on a project for a client. And I discovered those theme marketplaces. And the idea that I can create themes and sell them instead of working on one-time projects inspired me so much that I quickly just jumped to Photoshop and started creating layouts. I created this first theme, tried to create this first theme and created a front page and created another page and another one. And it took me about, to be honest, six months because I was working on client projects at the same time. I was working in a printing company. And this was like a side thing for me. And after I've done all that, I realized that those pages, they don't align. And I didn't even have the idea of what this theme should do and for who I am building this theme. So I thought that I do have these layouts. I need to develop them. And I don't really know how to do that. So it will probably take me even more time to learn. So I started learning how to build themes. And it took me even more time to learn WordPress and to understand how it works, how actions, filters, and all those things work. And it took me another several months. And after that, without, like, after a year of work and realizing that I don't have a product to sell, I thought that I need another kind of approach because this approach that I had really didn't work. So I decided that I need to research the market and understand what kind of themes I can build to. I mean, there are like many kinds of themes, one big theme that try to sell all kinds of problems and small themes. And I understand that being a one-man theme shop, I cannot create big projects, big themes. So I thought that I can create niche themes that would be dedicated to one problem. So I decided that my approach at this time should be this. I need to ask why I design a theme. And this is really important because if you have the answer to this question, you can filter all your design decisions through this question. And the simple answers to it can be like this. You can design a theme to showcase your work or to sell products or to promote an event. And the wrong answers to this question are make it look cool or earn a lot of money or include more options than another theme. And basically, these three letter answers will lead you to nowhere. And if you design themes with a clear understanding of why you're designing it, it probably will get you further than without understanding, and like I did with my first theme. So once you have answered to this question, there is another very important question that you need to answer before you even get to design. And this question goes like this. Who you design the theme for? And it is very tricky because what I see that most many developers and theme shop owners tend to think that they are designing themes and creating themes for people who purchase their themes or download them for free. But in reality, I believe that we as theme shop owners, theme designers, theme developers, we create themes for actual people who visit the website and not for people who purchase their themes. But we need to find balance so that people who create websites themselves and can also do it without any problems. So these are top answers to the question, who we design the theme for. And the wrong answers to this question is people who buy the theme or parents to make them proud of you. All right, so this is top two questions that I believe you need to answer before you get to design anything. Now moving, yeah, sorry. So once you understand who you design the theme for, you understand the expectations of those people. You understand what questions do they have, what fears do they have. And this really helps you to filter your design decisions as well. All right, so now moving to actually how to design the theme once you have those questions on why and who. All right, so the first step in designing a theme, like in my approach that I learned by creating websites for clients, for my own theme shop, and creating books, is to create a site map. Simple site map may look something like this. Each rectangle represents a single page. And basically what site maps gives you is a big picture of a project. You can see the user's journey towards the conversion where he converts from site visitor to a subscriber or to a customer and something else what you're trying to achieve. It also gives you a number of pages that you need to design. And it can be very helpful when you need to put a quote on your work if you're doing the design for a client because once you know how many pages you need to design, you can give an estimate on how much time do you need. And this will help you to understand the project better. So the next step is create wireframes. And it may sound pretty simple, but without wireframes, it is still hard to understand what actually you need to design. And what wireframes give you is the ability to iterate over many ideas quickly. You don't, we don't design yet, we're exploring. We can understand what we need to design in future. So wireframes give you a more detailed picture of a project and also understanding of what design elements you can reuse. And it is very helpful because it will save you much time during the design process and also during the development because when you have those design beforehand, when you have those elements beforehand, when you understand what elements are, you can create them and basically create multiple pages with them when you're designing. So, and this is like an example of a wireframe. It is very important to create wireframes quickly because like I said, we're not designing yet, we're exploring ideas. We can, we need to spend like two minutes on each page and not more than two minutes because time is money, time is everything we have. And this is an example of as I think not a very good wireframe because you see all those shades and images, it looks like a design that already, you don't need to use Photoshop to create, to go further. All right, next step is to start with a style guide. Again, we're not designing just yet, we are creating a style guide. And what style guide gives us is the ability to create basic elements that we can reuse later. And what we can include in the style guide is like basic typography, headings, paragraph, footnotes, block quotes and other typography elements, interaction elements like buttons, like input fields, text areas, checkboxes. And don't forget that those have multiple states, it's also important to design those multiple states as well. Also, like I said, in the style guide, we can include other reusable elements like images, if they have captions or user profiles or model windows or notifications and things like that. All right, now once we have the understanding of why we design the project, who we design it for, we have the sitemap, we have the wireframes, and we have the style guide. At this point, it is really, really easy to create the pages. And by the way, if you have scanned on your iPhones, you can scan this code and look at the basic style guide that I have in my latest theme. So at this point, you may ask me why you talk is about design and you're not telling us about typography, about typography rules, about color schemes and grids and things like that. And the reason for this is that I already gave a talk on typography at WorkCamp US in 2015 and you can watch that. But also because there are people who can teach you about typography and grids much better than I can do. And once you read the book called Elements of Typography Style, which I totally recommend, you will understand how typography works, what basic rules there are, and how to use them. And the same goes for grid system and graphic design. It's a perfect, great book and it applies to printed graphic design and web design and if you think of it deeply. All right, fun stuff. When we have the style guide, when we have a sitemap and wireframes, we can actually create pages, we can actually get to design. At this point, we are all designers, right? We have the, we imagine how the website will look and it will really take not too much time to create pages with the basic elements that we already have. So my advice at this point is to start with the conversion pages, like the pages when people actually purchase the product or become subscribers or add comments to your blog post. Because these are actually the pages where magic happens. These are pages that are most important for the project. And if you design those pages, first you have like more, how do I say it? It's really easy to start from the bottom and go to the top because you have the ability to test your style guide and to make adjustments to it. This is actually, well, usually this is my approach and you can test it and see if it works for yourself. Okay, one of the questions that people ask is what software to use to design themes. And the answer is simple. You need to use software that you are most efficient with. And because I have a graphic design background, I work for the print company, I like InDesign because it has great tools for working with styles. You can create styles for all your text elements and object elements and then reuse them and it's really efficient for me. But also, Sketch is a great tool and it's easier to learn Sketch than to learn InDesign if you're just starting out. Another great tool to design is Adobe XD, Experience Design. It's kind of a new tool and it tries to beat Sketch but I'm not sure if it's going to happen. And what it is good at is prototyping. Basically, you can create layouts with working buttons and input fields and show it to your client or test it yourself. Photoshop, everybody knows Photoshop has been around for ages and if you're good at Photoshop, there's nothing wrong with designing websites in it. And there's nothing wrong with designing in Google Chrome with HTML and CSS. If you have the understanding of the project and if you're your own client, like I did with my latest team, I had the wireframes, I had the idea and it was really fast to create the website with HTML and CSS right away without trying to design all pages because I had the idea in mind. So, fun mistakes to avoid that I wanted to share because so you don't make them. Wow, this ribbon looks so cool. I need it on my website too. It was like my approach to designing my first team and basically it looked like some elements taken from all over the internet and squeezed into one theme and even my mom didn't like it. So you need to understand why you're adding this or that element to the design because if it serves the purpose, if it helps to sell products or convert site visitors to subscribers, then go ahead and edit. If not, then maybe you should try something else. All right, I have designed 56 layouts of my minimal portfolio theme and I need to design 23 more, not ready just yet. This was my mistake when I designed Maker, one of my first teams that actually got released after that one, the first team. And I really, I designed every single page for that theme and I remember I spent like three months just on design but if you think about it, if you have the style guide and you have the basic design for a single page and you need to design, for example, a page for attachment, it doesn't take you much time to do it straight in HTML and CSS if you are developing your theme yourself. Maybe if you're working on a new version of YouTube, this is the right approach but for real people, like regular people like you and me, it's probably just going to steal your time. All right, I'm not sure what margin size to use, one M or 1.125 M and I need to spend three hours to experiment. This really doesn't help to, and it probably doesn't matter that much and if you come across a question when you design something, think of it this way, does it help to sell products? Does it help to get new subscribers? There's like difference in the margin. If you can't answer straight away, there are two scenarios. First, it doesn't matter and the second, you need to test it and in both ways, you need to ship the product to actually find out and the best way to find out is to get feedback from your, I don't know, site visitors, people who download your theme and I had 20 updates to make or since I'm something close to 20 since I first released it and I did those updates based on feedback and if I were to, like, if I tried to get everything right from the first time, it would probably not even get released by this time. So wrapping this all up, I would encourage you to don't get too stressed about margins and ribbons and stuff like that and keep the big picture in mind. So this is all I have for today. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much, Dmitri. We are in the very fortunate luxurious position of having lots of room for questions. So I think let's go to the floor of questions and straight away, we have someone at the microphone on that side and then we'll come across to you, sir. So yes, over there at the microphone. Do you want to bring the house lights up a little, stays lights down a touch so we can see people? Because it kind of, thank you, brilliant. Yes, sir. Right, thanks so much for your talk. Super interesting. Question that I have is, you mentioned that you're on the theme shop so could you talk a little bit about what went between releasing your first theme and making your first sale? How did it feel like or what's exactly the question? What went into it? What do you have to do? How was the set up? Like, how do you go from that selling? How did I get from zero to the first sale? There was like a way, long way of doing things over and over again in a very painful way because first I wanted to release a theme on one of the marketplaces and then I got rejected multiple times because the idea of creating simple themes is not like the most popular nowadays. So what I thought that I can create my own theme shop and create a sample version of the first theme and then create a pro version of this theme and to basically give the sample version for free and if people liked it, they would want to upgrade and this is how it went and it took me about, I don't know, half of the six months probably, maybe more to go from zero to building a theme shop and to building a theme and then to the first sale and it felt really, I don't know, I felt really happy when it happened because I had this idea of building a theme shop and then when it really happened, I couldn't believe it. It was like magic. Could you tell us what plugins and tools you used to sell? I use, easy to use downloads for selling themes and for updating, I use EDD software licensing plugin which helps to keep themes updated for paid versions of themes because once people download them, they can use the license code that connects their website with my website and then once the new version of the theme is released, they can just click update and it gets updated and this really helps to keep themes secure and up to date. Awesome, thanks a lot, thank you. Nice little name jet for EDD there. Get well soon Brad, we know you've got a cold and you would be here, take care buddy. Right, you know you had a cold, it's terrible, couldn't fly, what was this? Yes, question over there sir. Hi Dimitri, it's Sami here. Hi Sami. I have a couple of questions that are kind of related. How do you pick what kind of niche team are you building and what kind of themes have been most successful for you? So the first question is how I picked the niche, right? Yeah. With the first theme maker, it's a portfolio theme, I was actually, like they say, scrape your own itch. I needed a portfolio theme that looked really simple and would work fast without too many options and I couldn't find the theme that I liked. I liked some layouts of themes but I also thought that if I can create a theme for myself, I would probably, there probably are people who will want to use it as well and it worked really well. I did create this first theme and use it for my own website and yeah, this is how I picked the niche for the first theme. For the second theme, which is a theme for small businesses, is that also kind of related to the first one. I had a client who needed a theme for their event or I don't remember exactly what the event was but the idea was that they needed a theme that could look like a landing page and that they could have multiple sections on the front page and I thought that this idea is not like uncommon and many people want to do the same and want to have the same website and this is how Counter came to life and yeah, and for the third theme that I released yesterday is also I wanted to ditch the portfolio because I switched to building themes and wanted to run a blog and I created this theme for myself and also my sister wanted to use it so three themes came from the needs of me, me and my family and my clients so I'm not sure what theme I'm going to build next but it's probably going to be a WooCommerce theme because this is something that many people are interested in nowadays and yeah. And what was the second question? What kind of theme is happy and the most popular for you? Well, at this point, the first theme that I released, Maker, which is a portfolio theme, is the most popular because I guess because it's simple and because it doesn't have much options and it has like its own... There are certain people that are interested in this kind of themes and I believe this is why it is more popular than the other themes. Thank you. Another question over on this side? Yes, sir. Hiya, thank you. Great talk. Thank you. You touched on this a little bit. I hear from folks that are new to development and design that they want to become the next theme forest or mojo marketplace rock star and I was curious how you would respond to someone like that? Well, this is a tricky question. Well, this is my opinion on going to theme forest now or other marketplaces. I might be completely wrong because I'm not selling themes on theme forest but I think that if you want to be successful on theme forest now, you need to kind of have a team of developers and designers who would create like a big product because this is something what I see is popular on theme forest and themes that I like to build and like themes from my favorite theme shops like for example array themes, they are not doing as good as those that are on the top of the featured page on theme forest but it doesn't mean that you can create a successful theme shop without marketplaces because if you have other business models, it will still work if you think of the ways how to connect with your audience, how to reach people who would potentially use your themes so yeah, this is my take. The follow up to that would be if they do pursue it and they're just starting off what kind of design skills and development level and ability would they need to be successful? On marketplaces. And just in general in actually being able to build a theme? Well, I think that you need to understand the audience you're building a theme for and what kind of problems you're trying to solve with it because generally people, what I see, people try to solve multiple problems at once and this leads to themes that kind of don't solve anything and if you target specific audience with a small theme that solves a single problem, this is what I see is the best approach today. Maybe if you have a team of developers and you want to pursue a general theme that does multiple things, then it's the way to go but for me, it's niche themes, small themes that do one thing but do this thing very good. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, do we have any more questions? Oh, yes, one more, yes, that's it. What kind of theme are you gonna work on next? That's tricky. I think it's going to be a WooCommerce theme. I really liked, I wanted to release it before the theme that I released yesterday but I really, I need to research more on how to, what kind of WooCommerce themes are going to be best in the next few years maybe. So yeah, it's probably going to be a WooCommerce theme. Okay, thank you very much Dmitri. Thank you. Thanks for sharing those things. I have to be honest.