I made 720 WordPress theme styles

Over the last week or so, I made 720 unique theme styles. But here’s the kicker—this is all in a single theme. Wild.

With Assembler, you have a whopping 45 color combinations and 16 font sets that can be mixed and matched to generate an incredible 720 unique vibes. And while not technically individual themes, each permutation could very well serve as a unique theme style on its own.

Typically, WordPress themes come with a handful of theme style variations at most. But by leveraging the new capabilities of theme style variations landing in WordPress 6.6, this theme shatters the norm.

Check out this highlight I made, featuring Assembler and a few patterns, expressed across just 7 of the 720 permutations.

No kidding, it took longer to make this visual, than to curate these screenshots of the theme.

WordPress websites have become more interoperable with content expressed as blocks, and lately more so with style. You can actually take any of these color variations I made for Assembler and apply it to just about any other WordPress theme. There are quirks here and there, but the concept is sound.

This feels like we’ve landed upon a design system across WordPress websites that’s as interoperable as they come.

Styles and Templates

A WordPress theme consists of two main components: styles and templates. Styles dictate the website’s appearance, including colors and typography, while templates determine the content layout.

These days, a WordPress theme is not much more than just that—styles and templates. But the idea that either one of those may eventually be applied to any other theme is powerful.

Styles are already more interoperable than ever, with color/typography variations and section styles—both landing in WordPress 6.6. And perhaps in a future version of WordPress, templates will likely be just as decoupled from a theme (as patterns can be today). You can grab a pattern from the Pattern Directory and generally use it on most WordPress websites. Sure, we need to improve the quality of those patterns, but the spark is there.

A world of creative potential

With 720 unique styles in just this one theme (which can also be applied to any other theme), and hundreds of free patterns—like on the Pattern Directory and WordPress.com—the possibilities for laying out a beautiful website are nearly endless.

This combination of interoperable styles, patterns, and eventually templates, opens up a world of creative potential for WordPress creators. And I’m here for it. Are you?