Designing a brand-aligned WordPress catalog theme without a designer

In September 2022 I was starting my second year of Computer Science at Thammasat, a little over a year into the RUAMSUK PLATING LIMITED PARTNERSHIP role at RUAMSUK PLATING LIMITED PARTNERSHIP — the awards manufacturer my family has run since 2006, my father, the CEO, at the head of it. The month before, I had stood up the WordPress foundation for RS Medal, a catalog site for the company's medal line: hosting, a stock theme as the base, the plugin stack. September was the month it had to stop looking like a fresh install and start looking like it belonged to a company that had been making awards for sixteen years.

There was no designer. There was no budget for a designer, and hiring one for a part-time student project would have been a strange conversation to open with my father. So “brand-aligned” became a problem I had to define before I could solve it — because the brand did not live in any file I could open. It lived in the products: medals the factory casts, engraves, and electroplates in-house in Pathum Thani.

//The products were the only brand book

What existed: a logo, and shelves of finished product. No palette document, no typography spec, no rules. I decided to treat the products as the spec. Medal finishes gave me the accent palette — gold, silver, bronze — and everything else stayed deliberately neutral, so the product photography could carry the page instead of competing with it.

/* accents come from the product, not from a trend */
:root {
	--metal-gold: #c9a227;
	--metal-silver: #b7bcc2;
	--metal-bronze: #a5652b;
	/* everything else stays out of the way */
	--ink: #1f2933;
	--paper: #ffffff;
}

Typography followed the same logic. One display face for headings, an unremarkable body face, generous whitespace. The rule I gave myself was simple: any visual decision I could not defend by pointing at the logo or at a product did not ship. That single rule killed most of the decoration a second-year student with a stylesheet would otherwise commit.

//Information architecture was most of the design

The milestone in my project notes reads “brand-aligned theme and information architecture”, and the second half was the harder half. A catalog is only useful if it is organized the way customers ask, and customers do not ask the way a factory produces. Nobody enquires by alloy and millimeter; they ask for the event — a sports day, a graduation, a tournament. The structure had to speak the customer's language first and let the manufacturing detail live one level down. Concretely, every catalog page had three jobs:

• Recognition first — a visitor should know within seconds that this page sells medals, not plaques or trophies.
• The product big — photography at a size that shows the metal, because the finish is the selling point.
• A short path to a quote — every page ends at an enquiry, because that is where a custom order actually starts.

That last point shaped the biggest structural call: RS Medal shipped as a catalog, not a store. No cart, no checkout. Custom awards are quoted — engraving, sizes, quantities, deadlines — so a checkout flow would have been theater in front of a conversation. The theme's job was to get the right product in front of the right visitor and hand them to that conversation quickly, which is also what made the on-page SEO and the Google Ads wired in at the November launch worth anything.

//A stock base, a child theme, and knowing when to stop

I did not build the theme from scratch, and I would defend that today. A stock WordPress theme base ships with tested templates, responsive scaffolding, and an update path — weeks of work I did not have to redo badly. My changes went into a child theme: the palette, the typography, the catalog templates, all layered over the base where a parent update could not overwrite them.

// functions.php — parent styles first, overrides second
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', function () {
	wp_enqueue_style('parent', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css');
	wp_enqueue_style('child', get_stylesheet_uri(), ['parent']);
});

The honest counter-argument is that this whole month might have been the wrong spend. A purchased premium catalog theme, configured over a weekend, would probably have looked more polished than my hand-tuned child theme did. And a designer would have questioned things I never thought to question — I was aligning the site to the brand while also being the only person deciding what the brand was, which is a quiet conflict of interest. What I called brand alignment was really consistency plus restraint, applied without exception. I still think it was the right call for that year — the budget was zero and the practice was the point — but I stopped believing it was equivalent to design.

//One month, because it was the second time

The design phase fit inside September because I had already paid the tuition once. Five months earlier I had done the same job for RS Award, the company's plaque and award catalog, whose brand-aligned showcase theme I designed in April 2022. RS Medal was the same problem against a different product line, and most of the decisions ported: neutral shell, metal accents, photography-first templates, quote-first structure. October went to building out the catalog and CMS content, and the site went live in November with SEO, analytics, and ad tracking wired in.

The theme itself did not survive. In May 2025 I started the ground-up Next.js remake of RS Medal, and every line of that child theme was written off. What carried over was not code — it was the way of deciding: products as the palette source, structure in the customer's language, every page pointed at an enquiry. The files were disposable. The decisions were the asset.