Creating the look and feel of a new Magento store is, for those designers among us, one of the most exciting aspects of creating a new website. However, as we have seen, to give store owners the level of power and functionality that Magento affords, designers can no longer build static HTML pages, slap in a bit of PHP, and upload to the server. With high levels of functionality come higher levels of architectural complexity.

Fortunately, the complexity of Magento is not nearly as daunting once you understand the methodologies of how pages are built, rendered, and styled. I struggled initially to fully understand this system. However, today I feel very comfortable navigating the design-related components of Magento, after taking the time to understand how it all pieces together. Today, you have the added advantage of a much improved architecture, as well as this book in your hands.

Hopefully, I've also shown you that in most cases, if you want an extensively customized theme, you really don't have to start from scratch. By using the existing default themes, or using a third-party theme, you can do some quite extensive customizations simply by modifying a few key files.

Experiment and have fun!

In this chapter, we explored the Magento theme architecture, learning how the Magento Fallback Method works to ensure our pages always have something to show. We also covered the installation and configuration of themes in the Magento 2 store structure and learned how to modify our themes by understanding the use of layouts, handles, and blocks. Finally, we were introduced to a very powerful tool—the default layout file.

You'll no doubt want to spend some time exploring the concepts of this chapter. I don't blame you. Just writing this chapter makes me want to dig into a new design!

When you're ready to move on, we will begin the process of configuring your store for what it is intended: to sell.