In a conversation with another Canadian C5 developer yesterday we got to the topic of theming (CSS, XHTML, making themes etc.) and he said perhaps roughly estimating, that on some projects he spends 90% of the time in this area. Now normally I wouldn't put the number this high myself, but it depends of course on the project. The point is that in any given project, we often focus on what functionality is available, what addon we can use, how to build things, but in the end isn't a big portion of the cost of any project trying to make things look a certain way?

So I'm interested to know from some other developers, on average how much of your time goes to theming and what sort of things do you do to make that part more efficient? Also has anyone starting using design patterns or software such ashttp://pattern-lab.info. I recently discovered this project, and it's an interesting one to me because it breaks down the theming of pages into tiny pieces which they call atoms. These atoms then can be grouped to form molecules, and so on until you have a page made up of atoms. The potential then is that you could build a library of atoms, and create an infinite number of unique designs by mixing and matching different combinations of the atoms.

On a related note how many of you have used a C5 theme and basically run a site from it out-of-the-box? Or something close to that. I'm wondering if that is considered an option. I see that happening in WP sometimes, a lot of similar looking sites running a nice theme, fairly minimal or no customizations.