Well, I finally got around to working on a new theme for a bit, so here it is. It may still need a bit of polishing up, but I think it’s ready enough at this point.
I always qualify any of these announcements by saying that I certainly don’t consider myself a graphic designer of any merit, but I’ve been wanting to start from scratch on here for quite a while now, and I figured I might as well take the opportunity to get some practice.
I’ll eventually get around to packaging it up and releasing it for anyone who’d like to use it too. To get a feel for how it works with a wider variety of content, you can see it in action at a blog I added with some sample data designed for testing out the theme.
Hope you enjoy it!
PS - I’ll probably also package up the plugin I whipped up to replace the blog description with my Facebook status too, if anyone’s interested in that.
7 Comments
It’s cool, literally.
I’m surprised you’re not fluid width anymore though.
I like the color. I don’t like the blank space on the side. I love you.
need to get rid of the dashed link on the hidesidebarwidget. it too me a while to figure out what those upside down faces were. probably should bold up those minus signs or maybe put some sort of background color on them so you can tell they’re not just a decorative element.
plus, what everyone else said about the narrowness.
maybe some sort of hover element? something subtle like making the dashed link line solid? some extra padding all around would help with the stuck-to-the-left-side feeling too. i do like it, though.
I like how it is now.
But are you going to make me dig up all those comments about you ranting about fluid width?
Thanks for all the feedback. Couple responses:
Regarding the width: it’s not strictly “fixed”, it’s scalable relative to the text size, as you can see if you resize the text.
For the primary column it’s based on using a good “measure” value, since a lot of typography stuff I’ve been reading suggests that 50-70 characters is the optimum column width for reading. Having the column width be totally fluid (independent of text size) was making it more difficult to read on larger monitors (like the one on my laptop)
As for the empty space on the right, I’m thinking about going three column and having another sidebar over there, and splitting up the sidebar content between the two. I’ll probably also space everything out a bit more so it doesn’t feel so cramped over to the left.
I don’t really like the dashed underlining for the links in general either, but I didn’t want to put any extra time into thinking of something else. I’ve got a few other ideas now that I’ll try out later.
I like the colors.