After over a year in design and development and many long hours, Out of the Sandbox is proud to present its newest offering — the Artisan Shopify theme.
Artisan is a highly customizable Shopify theme that’s been optimized for stores that sell services — but its incredible flexibility means it’s perfect for almost any kind of online store.
Available now in the Shopify theme store and on the Out of the Sandbox website, Artisan comes with three theme styles: Barcelona, Victoria and Phoenix. Each of these styles have a fully functional demo store available to help inspire you and explore all of the possibilities that Artisan offers, including its flexible homepage.
Design
Artisan’s overall design style is clean and elegant, with a bit of whimsy and playfulness, making it a perfect choice for brands that want to look sophisticated but friendly at the same time.
In many sections, such as “image with text,” there are new options to include one or two images, which also become arranged in an offset, editorial style layout, adding to the elegance of your store design.
Top features
- Product tables: Allows you select up to three products to compare on homepage sections. These also can be used as pricing tables for store owners looking to showcase tiers of services, plans or membership options.
- Custom forms: Artisan brings a revolutionary new feature to forms — the ability to add a variety of additional custom fields. Fields can include custom single line or paragraph (text area) fields, dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons and even date pickers.
- Filterable gallery: The gallery page now features the ability to let users filter between types of images complete with slick animation effects.
- Product image thumbnail slider: If your product image gallery contains a higher number of images, Artisan will compact it into a slider-style setup to reduce visual clutter and make it easier to use.
- Featured product: On collection pages, the first product is showcased in a specially styled box to make it stand out. This is a great way to showcase new and featured products, best sellers or sale items.
- Banner overlays: Give slideshows and banners a unique flair, with semi-transparent image overlays. Easily create a myriad of looks by varying the type, position and colors.
Additional features and enhancements
- FAQ template: Give customers more information with this elegant template.
- Login page: Artisan adds the option to feature an image on the customer login page.
- Code enhancements: Artisan’s code has been engineered to use more snippets and consistent blocks of code that are used in multiple places throughout the theme.
- New and improved grid: Artisan is the first Out of the Sandbox theme to be built on a non-pixel based grid. While the class names in the column framework remain the same, behind the scenes the code now uses percentages. This is really more important for design and CSS nerds and many store owners won’t ever need to deal with this — but it can make customizations or tweaks easier.
Get into shape
From a visual standpoint, Artisan leverages the latest browser vector rendering technologies (SVG, or scalable vector graphics, for you design nerds) to feature customizable shape elements that are rendered without creating any image files in many homepage sections.
Depending on the location in Artisan, the shapes feature can be applied as background textures or to photos or other design elements. There are also a variety of shapes available — circles, stars and multiple polygons.
Store owners are also able to select the color palette used for the dynamically generated shapes — which, when used backgrounds, also take on a parallax-style scrolling effect.
Changing shapes is as simple as just a few clicks in the theme editor — you don’t need to jump back and forth between an image editor and Shopify to try out new shapes or looks.
Shapes are also used to create optional custom overlays on homepage sections — each with a unique look.
Overlays not only make your text easier to read, but adds an additional visual layer to your store. Each overlay can also be customized with a color of your choice and the text will automatically be aligned with the overlay position you pick.
On mobile devices, overlays automatically move below the image, avoiding any odd placement issues, with a custom background color behind it, ensuring you can still add a creative pop to your smaller screen visitors.
In addition to shapes, Artisan also has numerous subtle and elegant accent elements such as vertical lines and borders, that can be turned on or off on a per section basis, making it even easier to create a variety of unique looks in Artisan.
Mobile (friendlier)
Slideshow sections and the banners that run across the top of pages, collections and select other pages throughout Artisan now feature the option to designate an alternative mobile image, making it easier to have images that work best in different size screens. This feature is optional, however.
Artisan also offers an alternative mobile layout for testimonials that change the section to a slider-style module, making it easier to fit more content into a smaller amount of space.
How to get it
The Artisan Shopify theme is available now. You can purchase it directly on the Out of the Sandbox website here or head over to the Shopify theme store.
