Yesterday the first draft of Click Foundry’s new custom WordPress theme. My goal is to make it feel modern, lightweight, and aligned with this idea of radical transparency.
I know I want Barba for smooth transitions, but I’m avoiding the heavy, trendy stuff you see everywhere—oversized text and scroll-hacking animations. They’re visually beautiful, but they pull attention away from the actual information.
The tide feels like it’s shifting because of LLMs. Their interfaces are simple, toned-down, and efficient, and that inspires me to design something similar for Click Foundry. The theme already has its husk in place. I’m using _S as the theme backbone, with bootstrap offering grid support, and Barba is running menu updates. The structure is there, and I have a screenshot of the first pass. Eventually, I plan to add a live chat component, probably starting with Slack integration.
Next, I’m working on cards for pages, articles, and case studies, and experimenting with subtle animations. I’m especially interested in how LLM UIs pack so much functionality into compact spaces—Claude’s sidebar, ChatGPT’s search, and other small but powerful features. Those are design cues I want to pull into this project as I keep building it out in the open.