I’m just post­ing so that the RSS mob realises some­thing has indeed changed. ;) Yeah, that was a joke. Kind of. Not a dis­cus­sion for now, any­way. The theme is built around my film SLR cam­era, a Pen­tax Asahi SP 500. Vaguely inspired by Dale’s somewhat-cynical com­ment a few days back, although more out of a knowl­edge that I really should stop being lazy and build my own theme, and a gen­eral re-design itch, I whipped this up over the course of today.

I shot a range of pho­tos of the SLR cam­era to use as a design base, and even­tu­ally wound up chos­ing one as the main design ele­ment, crop­ping off part of another to inte­grate within that after some edit­ing (that’s the “SC 500″ and ser­ial num­ber you see burnt onto the front of the lens bevel), and scal­ing one down to use as a back­ground for the search area.

The search area, inci­den­tally, is inspired by a post of Matthom’s a few months back enti­tled “Attrac­tive, acces­si­ble web forms.” The image I’ve used is one of the length of the lense — the the­ory behind this being that the pur­pose of a search func­tion, as with the lense on a cam­era, is to focus and zoom — one being images, and the other, information.

I’m think­ing the typog­ra­phy doesn’t feel ter­ri­bly inspired, but I can deal with that given its clar­ity. The colours of the post header type, by the way, have noth­ing to do with Flickr — the link and link hover colours used to be more pink and more light blue before I noticed how sim­i­lar it looked to Flickr’s brand­ing! I’ve shifted it down a bit, but I thought I’d clar­ify now that any resem­b­lence is purely inci­den­tal, before some­one else said anything.

I haven’t decided if the header is cool or annoy­ing yet. I wanted it to be appar­ently com­plex, ide­ally with­out need­ing to use images, but I don’t know if this is tak­ing things a lit­tle too far — hover back and for­wards too quickly and it is a con­fus­ing expe­ri­ence. The inter­face can be sim­pli­fied eas­ily, but I thought I’d ask for feed­back on the weird/trippy ver­sion first.

Changes in summary

• IMO cleaner markup than Placid (the pre­vi­ously used theme by Chris Lin)
• Also lighter (band­width wise). This theme is a 58KB tem­plate, Placid was 130KB. Par­tially code/markup, but largely images. Reduced use of images in this tem­plate will also reduce hits and thus improve load­ing times.
• Opti­mised for wider screens: fluid lay­out, works best from 1024 upwards. Moti­vated at least in part by my own acqui­si­tion of more screen real estate recently
• Built for Word­Press 1.5 from the ground up — the first theme I’ve devel­oped myself for this web­site that’s had that advantage
• Inclu­sion of a “Recent Com­ments” section
• 3 col­umn lay­out using absolute positioning
• “Bright” design, because I’ve been accused of always com­ing up with darker colour schemes, etc.