Themes & plugins Intro
What belongs in the Customiser and what belongs in CSS
The same colour change can end up somewhere the next person finds it, or somewhere they never will. The criterion is discoverability, not taste.
Technote
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34 articles· Themes & plugins · Designers
Themes & plugins Intro
Content decides your breakpoints, not device names
Breakpoints named after devices go stale every year. Widen a component slowly, note where it stops working, and that width is your breakpoint.
Themes & plugins Intro
Why 16px is the baseline for body text — and when it is not
16px is not a trend somebody picked; it is the default browsers and users already agreed on. Take it as the baseline — and know when Korean long-form…
Themes & plugins Intro
Deriving a full colour scale from one brand colour
One brand colour cannot draw an interface. Derive hover, pressed, tint and disabled states by rule and you stop picking new colours on every screen.
Themes & plugins Intro
Building a child theme: one header line and the load order
Two files is all it takes. Get the Template header line or the stylesheet load order wrong, though, and no amount of CSS will change the screen.
Themes & plugins Intro
Contrast: where grey body copy fails
Light grey body copy looks best in the mockup and reads worst on a real screen. Three threshold values let you judge it at the moment you pick…
Themes & plugins Intro
Mobile-first is a question of order, not taste
Starting narrow leaves you fewer decisions. Starting wide means deciding what to throw away at every step — and that decision never ends.
Themes & plugins Intro
Why 1.5 line-height is not enough for Korean body text
The web's default leading was calibrated for the Latin alphabet. Hangul packs more strokes into the same square and sits taller because of final consonants, so the same…
Themes & plugins Intro
What a design token actually is
A swatch on a mockup and a design token can hold the same value and still be different things. The difference is the name — and the name…
Themes & plugins Intro
Edit the parent theme and the next update erases it
A theme update replaces the whole folder — that is correct behaviour. Which is why your changes need to live somewhere it does not reach.
Cited
Technotes worth reading next
Topics outside WordPress are collected on Dongji Communication Tech Insights, run by the same team. The summaries below are quoted from the originals; the titles link to them.
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Working with AI
Writing a CLAUDE.md — teaching an AI coding assistant your project
AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot do better work the more precisely they know your project. Here is a structure and a set of principles that hold up.
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Working with AI
Prompting an AI for UI design — drafting with Claude and GPT
Asking an AI to "make a nice button" gets you a disappointing button. Structured prompts that carry constraints, references and a defined role get you the design you meant.
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Themes & plugins
SCSS from the ground up — variables through module structure
The core syntax of SCSS (Sass) and what it solves that plain CSS cannot: variables, nesting, mixins, @use and module structure — organised around patterns you can use immediately.
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Themes & plugins
Design tokens and theme colour systems — brand identity in SCSS variables
How to turn a colour palette from a pile of hex codes into a system that means something — semantic token structure and SCSS variable patterns, from a real project.
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Performance optimization
Designing a responsive typography system — the science of readability
Hard-coded pixel font sizes are over. Type scales, fluid sizing with clamp(), Korean webfont optimisation and line-height ratios — building typography that reads well on any screen.
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Development workflow
From Figma to SCSS — a designer-developer handoff guide
Minimising what gets lost between a Figma file and the code: extracting tokens, naming components, keeping the spacing system in sync — the whole workflow, step by step.