Theme design principles

When it comes to design, there are many great sources for guidance and inspiration online. Whilst we don't want to inhibit your creative genius, we encourage Theme designers to adopt good design patterns and practices.

We're not perfect! Our design principles have been formulated as the result of hundreds of carefully crafted mistakes and tragic design decisions we've made over many years. We fully expect our "Theme design principles" will continue to evolve with experience. 

Font selection

Except for custom themes, which may incorporate fonts from any source, font selections for Themes within our Theme Library are limited to web-safe fonts or Google fonts.

Headings

Headings (H1 to H6) are reserved for short, important text or numbers including page, category and product titles. They can be any font style, including display, handwritten or script. Your font selection must be legible at each heading size.

Avoid applying'text-transform'. Headings should remain in the same case as typed. Enforcing the text case to uppercase, for example, tends to confuse users who will input titles with the incorrect text case.

Body text & paragraphs

Body text and paragraphs represent the default font selection suitable for long-form writing. Hence, a serif or sans-serif typeface is required. Do not use display, handwriting or script styles. 

The default font-size for modern web browsers is 1rem (the root em size) - the equivalent of 16px. We recommend that your default body text size remain 1rem and all font sizes expressed in rem units.