I like the use of whitespace. It draws the reader to what's truly important about a blog (and something that many a designer here forgets): the posts themselves.

What you also (and more importantly, IMO) have here is a solid framework for which you can base more complex and visually interesting designs. Just plug in the appropriate CSS and away you go!

My only real nit to pick is with the link colors. There isn't a whole lot of contrast with the rest of the text, particularly within the posts themselves; I have a hard time telling what's a link and what's not. But beyond that it's a solid design. And worthy of

Very well done. If I were to use this I would move the navigation text down an em or two so it's not blocking (or being blocked by) the pattern in the corner, and I would add some leading in the entries via line-height. But that's minor nit-picking...

So. Where's the rest of the design?

I like it. It's dark, yet readable; something you don't find too often around here.

A couple of bugs I found while poking around the source, though:

1.) Your a.menu selectors should actually be a#menu, since you've declard menu as an id rather than a class.

2.) You still see the horizontal scrollbar at 800 x 600, at least on Firefox. I'm guessing it's the main picture, since it (and its container id) has a width of 800px, where the actual viewable width is close to 780-785px. Crop some of space to either side of the picture and you should be good to go.

The use of Times New Roman in itself isn't bad (I don't feel as strongly against it as some around here), but it hangs lifeless on the screen. Perhaps using a different font for headings and such will liven things up. Ah, but the source has Franklin Gothic Medium, you say? That's why it's a good idea to specify a similar, more widely used font after the first choice, then using one of the default font choices of the same style. For example, the font-family attribute might read:


font-family: "Franklin Gothic Medium", "News Gothic", sans-serif;


That way, the audience will see something close to what you've envisioned, even if they don't have the exact font installed.

Second, I want to point out something in this design that's been popping up with alarming regularity around here: coloring your links to match the surrounding text. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't read a blog to play "hunt the pixel" with the blog's design if the author has provided any intersting links. Please (not just you, but to anyone else reading this) try to make sure that you choose a link color that is not only different than the surrounding body text, but also stands out from it.

I can't rate this at all; it breaks horribly in Mozilla. If seen templates get away without closing the tag before, but not with no starting tag. You may want to fix the quotes in the tag if you want it to be seen...

It's...psychadelic! The non-graphic contents overlap their parts of the background slightly in Mozilla, though (about 3-4px). It's nothing a good box-model hack won't cure...

I can't rank this skin, since there doesn't seem to be anything to rank. All I see are the titles of the posts, nothing else...

The dark text on a dark background is a major problem (I've mentioned it on other skins, so I need to mention it here). Change the text color to something more complimentary to the dark blue behind it--perhaps a light blue, white or grey.

Also, you may want to do something about the dancing text that occurs when you hover over a link. Increase the line-height attribute of the parent elements where the link is found to something larger than the link's line-height...

Pretty interesting effort. I like the look. I like the use of Century Gothic, it's a bold choice and anything that breaks the Verdana/Tahoma monotony is okay in my book. However I would replace the 'overflow-y' selector in your posts div with a simple 'overflow'. The posts "jump the box" in non-IE browsers...