So the last time, we had up the very first three steps. Now is time to get somewhere else than just having what we want to do, is time to start making it.

Step 4: sketch!

Yeah, we had some brainstorm before. But let’s give our theme a solid form, trying to get an approach of how the theme will look when running with our forum script. This step can be done on both paper or computer, as we’re making something more concrete. This shouldn’t take long, or be very detailed.

Step 5: Mockup

A mockup is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, evaluating a design, promotion, and other purposes. A mockup is called a prototype if it provides at least part of the functionality of a system and enables testing of a design.[1]

Well, that was just to save you a google search. Now, back to our theme. The mockup can be done in any image manipulation application, and it attemps to represent how the actually theme will look like. Now you can use your sketchs to guide yourself while making this. But now you have to polish every detail you can, since this mockup will be the base of your theme from now on. Try to keep dimensions in mind when making your mockup, you’ll be most likely to slice this document for your theme.

Step 6: Slicing

Now we have to slice our mockup, this step requires some thinking (specially if you’re making a fluid theme). Since we want a quality theme, we’ll try to avoid using img tags on our markup to give shape to our theme, that wouldn’t be semantic. Instead of placing img tags, we’ll use CSS backgrounds. So you have to think what way you’ll slice your mockup, so you can apply the background to existing elements on the templates (so we don’t get with tons of divs which would slow the page load), of course, in most cases we’ll have to add new elements or edit the current ones to achieve our design.

hmm… what did you say?

To explain this steps in a better way, in the next days we’ll be posting an article which goes through all this steps with a real example, and the theme will be released once we cover all the steps!