Introducing the Future Abyss theme

This blog now uses a new WordPress theme created by myself called Future Abyss. After several false starts I finally found a nice concept and quickly put together a new minimal look for my beloved blog.

Typefaces

Header graphics has been done with Linotype Futura, a very popular font originally designed by Paul Renner in 1927 and still widely used today. Since Futura is not found on the Average Joe’s computer I set titles in Helvetica (with Arial as fallback) to give those a similar appearance to the header graphics.

Body text is set to 12 pixels Georgia, with a 18 pixel of leading (line-height in CSS terms), which gives us a 1.5 ratio, used as base unit in setting margin and padding of page elements. To ease reading main column width in sized in a way to accommodate text lines of about 80 characters.

Layout

The layout is a typical three-columns affair, with the leftmost column holding the most important piece of content, while the other two columns contain archived contents and extra information such as about, contact, the obligatory blogroll and syndication feed.

Behind the scenes the layout is made up of sixteen columns (as explained in the Cameron Moll’s post Gridding the 960). The gutter (the space between each column) is set to be equal to the already mentioned text leading.

Post pictures

When it makes sense I want to place a picture right under the post title, so not having fancy graphics everywhere on the page will allow the opening picture to stand out more and immediately catch reader’s attention.

Markup and styles

The markup uses a tableless approach to position elements on the page and maximizes separation between page structure and applied styles.

Current page title is tagged with a h1 element and HTML lists (dl, ul and ol) are used to code archives and comments listing.

I’m evaluating the possibility to serve unstyled pages to older browsers (e.g. IE5) instead of let them badly handle styling with unwanted results.

Rough corners

At the time of writing I’m still solving some layout problems, mostly due to IE lack of standards support.

Also, I’m dubious about the presence of the monthly archives list, it is way too long and not very useful, since browsing is better served by post categories and searching.

Additional features

The features I have in mind can be easily added via Wordpress plug-ins:

• Integration with my del.cio.us account.
• Gravatar support in user comments would be good, but in order to do that I need to rethink the way I show comments.

Possible theme release

Does it makes sense to release the theme to the public? Adapt the theme for another blog installation means that one has to own the Linotype Futura font (or another Futura incarnation) hence I’m not expecting Future Abyss to become the next WordPress Kubrik theme. :^)

That said, it probably makes sense to release the theme anyway, since the Creative Commons license I’m using allows redistribution and adaption of the work and web geeks could be interested to edit it in some way.

For the impatient I’ve setup a public Subversion repository to grab the code. Please do a check out using the following command and install it like a normal theme (…).

Update for Mar 31, 2008: Download the Future Abyss theme here.

Enjoy.