Should Magento's blank theme still be used as a theme baseline (Magento version 1.7)?

Question

A good number of the tutorials I've found on Magento theme development recommend starting off with using blank as a guideline for making your own custom theme. A lot of these articles are pretty old, as of the current version (1.7), is this still the case?

P.S. - If there are any good/relevant theme development articles out there, aside from Magento's official design guide, please feel free to link them.

Answer 1

In my opinion you should never 'carve out' your own theme from a base theme. You aren't learning theme development in its entirety. You will potentially run into unforeseen consequences. You will likely have excess code and templates by the time you are done.

I wrote a Magento 1.6.1 tutorial on creating a theme that should hold up for 1.7:

http://zaclee.net/magento/make-magento-1-6-theme-from-scratch

If you run into any problems with 1.7 let me know and I'll be glad to take a gander.