After 2 days, 16 hours of work, I intro­duce my new theme UnDe­prived :)   Feels good… :D

I would even­tu­ally do a writeup for my entire design process of com­ing up with this theme.  That because I think I am hav­ing a case of early alzheimer or some­thing.  I can’t remem­ber what I want to do in the next 5 min­utes, and I have to resort to use a task man­ager (Remem­ber the Milk) to remind me of things lately.  So, writ­ing down things is one of the ways try­ing to improve my crappy mem­ory, and jog­ging down the process helps me to under­stand how I came up with cer­tain things and hope­fully improve the process later on.  The inspi­ra­tion for this design came from a book just lay­ing around that got me going.  Besides that, I would like to thank my boyfriend Danny and my bro Wil (Java­Junky) for feedback.

Lastly, an inter­est­ing note dur­ing the theme build­ing process is that IE7 as every­one knows has 1 or 2 pix­els dif­fer­ence between Fire­fox.  When I tried to add the + sign back­ground images to the lists, it was a big pain and very annoy­ing.  No mat­ter what I did, IE7 seems to be 1 pixel up higher or 1 pixel lower.  Even­tu­ally, I added line-height to the text in ratio font of 8pt : 13pt line-height, so 9pt : 14pt and so on… That seems to fix the prob­lem com­pletely.  The prob­lem is that the height of the text are ren­dered dif­fer­ently from the two browsers.  So, when you CSS-ing fonts and texts, don’t for­get to add line-height.  It will save you lots of headaches.

Well, hope you like this new theme.  Feed­back are greatly appreciated!

Note: I have not tested this theme on IE6 yet.  I’m focus­ing on the two newer browsers.  I’ll fix it up for IE6 next week.

Update: 7/28

Well, good news is IE6 now behaves nicely with only 3 lines of CSS fix.  Before it was just mess­ing up the header, the rest of the con­tent seems to be fine.  The only thing I don’t really care to fix is the PNG back­grounds – IE6 should be burn anyways.

And have to give IE Tester credit for get­ting this done quickly.  I was think­ing of installing a vir­tual server using VMWare’s Vir­tual Server, but with IE Tester which sup­ports from IE5-8, don’t need to do that.  So big kudos to IE Tester.