One word best describes this theme: BEAUTIFUL. This is type of quality work that inspires web and graphic designers alike. This theme is complete with textures, gradients, shadows as well as proper fontology, excellent spacing and superior color scheme. It also contains unique graphic elements such as hand-drawn icons, random backgrounds and irregular borders that you seldom see in any other websites.

The Homepage

Sketch’d combines Wordpress’ CMS ability. This means that the theme is capable of showing static-like pages with the ability to edit the content from behind the scenes. More like a regular web page (not a blog post) – but you edit it like a post. Take for instance, the Sketch’d home page. You will see a large feature area that seems like it’s a static design. This is actually a post that is assigned to a specific category in order for it to show in this designated container, styled in this special manner. Directly below this “Leading Story” section are three mini feature stories evenly spaced from each other.

The Sidebar

The designer totally discarded straight borders. The sidebar containers have this “nostalgic” type borders with hand drawn swirls and shades in the background that surprisingly blends with the overall design. Sidebar content is in traditional Georgia fonts, with bold effect on mouse hover, adding to that randomness feel of the layout. Note that the “Subscribe” piece of torn paper with a paper clip is a very nice touch.

The Templates

I can’t say anything different about the inner templates of the theme. Elements are consistent: the fonts, the borders, the comments template – are all kept in great detail, complimenting the theme as a whole. For instance, the “Share this article” section after each posts (commonly known as the socialize buttons). The designer purposefully ignored to use shiny icons for the “Digg this”, “StumbleUpon” and “Delicious” buttons – instead, kept the same Georgia text links.

What I would’ve liked to see:

Despite the beauty of the theme, there are a couple of things that I’m not crazy about. These are minor things – which can be fixed by plugging in a couple lines of code. Nor am I so sure if this was done in purpose:

• Shorter content in the archive pages – you will notice in the archive pages, each post content is shown in full. This kind of defeats the purpose of having to click on the “Read More” link because you really don’t get to read more.
• A Search Form – Now why in a world would someone need a search form?

Overall, Sketch’d is a good example of how creative one can get in designing themes. It’s consistent and random at the same time, good looking and effective. The downside of it is: with a theme that looks this good – your content should at least be of some quality. Sad to see this theme just be filled with nonsensical and empty ramblings. But I guess that’s totally up to you.

Sketch’d is sold for $49.