The Forgettable Mister Ruthsarian

Skinnable Skidoo

To prove that redux is very skinnable I plan on producing themes for it. From time to time you might check back and find I've put another up. At least that's the intention... I may very well ignore redux and move on.

But I've already produced one new theme: Future.

It was initially inspired by a moment I had where I perceived the future of web design as being nothing but soft pastels and other light colors. I think the color scheme is a bit too soft, but so be it. It has a few key features that I like about the layout so I'm leaving it. The first is the masthead being a solid color that goes right up against the top of the viewport. No margins here! And I think the perception of using negative space to form the title for the page is a great compliment to the marginless top.

Would you call that negative space? Or is the blue the negative space? I'll let the art critics figure that out.

The layout has a max-width applied to it, but will shrink down to a minimum of 600 pixels wide. It's both fluid and dynamic. If anything I think that's a trait you'll see a lot in future web pages. It bridges both the fixed-width and fluid paradigms. And with IE7 finally supporting the max/min-width properties, it'll be much more accepted practice.

Now on a bright monitor like an LCD or a Mac you might not notice it but the side margins (if your resolution is less than 1024x768 you won't see this) are a slightly darker-than-white color. This then reveals that the middle column goes all the way to the bottom regardless of how tall the content of the column is. This is a trick stolen from Tank!. I like it.

I tried to get away from placing borders and lines around every single element. That's one of my habits and I wanted to get away from it a little bit. Somewhat successful I think.

And one last bit, something I did by accident, look at the menus. Each menu item has a white border inside the darker color outer border. I think it makes them stand out just a little bit more, but isn't so obvious as to disrupt your eyes moving across the page.

Now obviously this theme is broken in one very key area: color. They're too soft, too washed out. You would never use this color scheme because users with contrast problems would have great difficulty using the page. Furthermore, I think it starts to annoy your eyes after about 20 seconds. So were you to use this theme I'd say darken the colors up a bit, maybe stick left and right borders on #page-wrapper that are darker than the background color of the body element and maybe 5 pixels wide or so. And maybe add another 50 pixels of padding to the top of the masthead. I can't get enough empty space!