Liberate your data from WordPress. The Libre theme extracts all the relevant data from WordPress and puts it in an XML document. XSL templates are applied to this document to create HTML. You could extend the default templates or write completely new ones. Or you could just leave the templates as they are and create your own extended theme using just CSS.
Theme configuration like defining sidebars or thumbnail sizes is done using the definitions in the style.css file just as easy as how you define your theme name and description.
For other things like your logo on the login page the theme automatically searches for an image and shortcodes can be generated just by dropping the files in the correct folders.
The basic theme could be modified but it's primarily set up to be modified using a child theme. For more information on how to create a child theme visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes. This theme comes without any styling and is intended as a framework for theme devolopers.
This theme requires the lowtone-content plugin for its dependencies.