Inspired by ALA
Tweaking your CSS is one of those essentially useless activities where you can spend hours and hours and yet really not do anything productive except move your design around the tiniest little bit. But I checked out A List Apart's new design this morning and liked their cleanness, so I tweaked my design a bit to be even more sparse. I literally changed less than a dozen lines of CSS, but I like the newer look quite a bit.
First, I got rid of the font-size: 90%; I think I like full-on font sizes now, even though they may seem "big" to some people, that's part of the point. I also got rid of almost all the boxes. Originally, the idea of the boxes was to give strong visual cues that each post is a page and thought unto itself, but I don't think that's needed any more - the dashed lines at the bottom work nicely. The colors are the same by the way - they were this color before ALA used them! I tried centering the headers, but they looked sort of goofy, so I didn't do that. I also smooshed the width of the page a bit back down to 700px. I should probably look at more "resize-friendly" ways of specifying the page width, but that'll be the next project. I just saw an article not too long ago about not using px sizes anywhere on your page and it looked interesting. I'll have to work it out.
The header graphic I changed out the other day is looking dark on some people's computers - I'm not sure what to do about that since it looks fine on my computer. If you're a Photoshop god, please feel free to send me a gamma/color/contrast corrected version that looks good on your monitor and I'll compare.
I should probably post something besides "hey, look at my new blog" at some point soon... :-).
-Russ