Hello from a total beginner

[LeoHartas]

Hello Magento Community,

I work as a freelance illustrator but are looking to expand my skill-set with Magento and have already picked up quite a large commission to design an e-commerce site. I know I should be learning the skill first but my client is very insistent that I do the work, I think because they like my design sense!

I have a couple of questions relating to this and would be grateful for your opinion:

1. Do you think it is possible for a beginner to do this? I'm fairly tech experienced particularly in design including some Wordpress. I've looked through the Magento 2 install and followed some online tutorials to get a basic site up and running.

2. My client wants a very specific visual design. Should I start with modifying the Magento 2 Blank theme, invest in and modify a 3rd party theme, or look to learning theme design from scratch? I find themes modification of design is quite confusing.

Thank you,

Leo

Leo Hartas Illustration

[sherrie]

Hi @LeoHartas, welcome to the Magento world! Will you be implementing the theme as well or just focusing on the design?

[LeoHartas]

Thank you for your response Sherie,

I already have the design so I'm looking to implement it. I really need to be able to fine tune the layout, which, as I understand it will require editing an existing theme or designing a new one from scratch. I'm sure I sound like I'm wanting to run before I can even crawl!

I've started following a book that seems to be exactly what I need, but I've found it tough going just getting Magento installed on a local server. Although I finally got it installed I now get a weird error instead of the Luma store I was expecting. (If you know easily what's causing this - see screen shot - I'd love to know, though I'm aware that I should post it in a new thread elsewhere on the forum)

The book is Magento 2 Theme Design.

Best wishes,
Leo

www.leohartas.com

[sherrie · Accepted solution]

The best thing to do would be to post that error to the theming board here: https://community.magento.com/t5/Theming-Layout-Design-Questions/bd-p/magento-2-theming

This way others can help identify, it may also help out someone else down the road.