Apparently Zenburn is one of the most popular editor colour schemes out there. It’s pretty good for a light-on-dark theme too.

I’ve added a new theme for those of you browsing the site with an iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s based on Joe Hewitt’s iUI library, with some WordPress plugin magic.

[stars: 3] Surf’s up. Despite mirroring the penguin theme from a number of recent movies, Surf’s up is a fresh, funny, surf film. I was especially impressed by the superbly executed mocumentary plot, the smart voice casting (Jeff Bridges as a surf maven), and the hip surf-punk soundtrack (I expected the standard over-played 60s tripe).

In the theme of groking your gut: The Hacker’s Diet, a free, classic text online … engineering for your self.

A simple site of photography lighting tips, presented in an interesting foolscap paper theme.

I had a fit of inspiration on the weekend and some free time, so I took a swipe at simplifying the site. I had been toying with designs over the summer, but all of my ideas turned out boxy and busy. There’s something about the tools that suck me into piling on the partitions and tidbits.

The design and implementation are easy for me, it’s the inspiration that’s elusive. I can look at hundreds of designs, finding things here and there that I like. I’ll go away and sketch out some of the ideas, but nothing will stick. I can spend gobs of time in inspiration limbo and then one day I’ll find the one thing that tweaks me. Then there’s no stopping me.

This time I was inspired by a number of things that reminded me that it’s the writing that is important. The writing is only important if it’s read, and you can’t read it if it’s drowning in sauce. So I mocked up a whitespace-laden layout and started to play with logos.

Into logo hell …

The new layout took just under 3 hours to hash out as a Wordpress template. The logo took a bit longer. Again I lost my inspiration: I had a clean layout, but no colour or logo to anchor it. I wrote a script to render a slice of my font library in a few different colours, one of which it picked at random for the site’s banner. I couldn’t decide. Nothing seemed to fit.

But of course the logo doesn’t matter, if it’s the writing that’s important. I slept on it, and woke up to clarity. I saw the semi-randomly-selected font and instantly saw the colour and theme. It’s retro, and it’s chock full of whitespace.

The theme is posted, and the testing site is off. Looks good, eh? A sneak-peak of warpedvisions.org’s newest theme and some fonts I’m considering using for a new logo. My inspiration? The simple stylings of PlainSimple and Subtraction.

A “fresh” theme for WordPress, a very Web2.1-ish look.

A large list of reasons why you may need Vista.  The theme of the list?  It sucks less, to which I wonder why it took so bloody long.  Unfortunately, most of the reasons linked to by the article are provided by video blogs, requiring the ability to stream (mms://) Windows Media.