"many designers don’t have the time to learn the WordPress Codex. It’s huge. It’s intimidating. It’s confusing." — maybe it's just because I know Wordpress quit

"many designers don’t have the time to learn the WordPress Codex. It’s huge. It’s intimidating. It’s confusing." — maybe it's just because I know Wordpress quite well, but the documentation I found when learning years ago (it's even better now) wasn't difficult at all. The Wordpress community is so big that you can Google solutions to most problems, find solutions and learn at the same time. Of course being a designer and not a developer, you're going to struggle learning syntax and convention (that goes for any language or application like Wordpress). Stick with it, the Codex is great. It's true the Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven default Wordpress themes were bloated and if you were trying to use them as a base or learn, you'd probably be overwhelmed by the kitchen sink approach the core team took when creating those themes. Having said that, if you want a clean starting base for a theme, try using the bundled Twenty Twelve: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/twentytwelve http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/twentytwelve — which is arguably the best default theme ever to grace Wordpress. Most naked themes you encounter for Wordpress aren't naked at all (Bones especially abstracting an already abstracted CMS even more). Having said that, this naked theme looks good. It's actually naked and well commented but not naked to the point it's really any less simple than Twenty Twelve (just less files). The benefit of considering a default theme as a starting base is that you get to see how the experts develop a Wordpress theme and the added bonus of how to use the custom background functionality and the Theme Customization API as well. This kind of reminds me of my Actual Barebones HTML5 Github: https://github.com/Vheissu/Actually-Barebones-HTML5-Template https://github.com/Vheissu/Actually-Barebones-HTML5-Template — It's literally a HTML file that gives you a HTML5 structure without assuming you want jQuery or anything of the sorts. The term naked and barebones seems to have lost a lot of meaning in the web world.