I just finished off and submitted to BlogSkins the design I had shown to a couple of you this weekend. Appropriately enough (given what today is to me), it's titled Aged. I had toyed with the idea of calling it Classique, but stuck with Aged because that was where the original germ of the idea came from.
I had originally wanted to do something that looked aged, with grunged up fonts and the like, but I was playing around in PSP's text tool and discovered that the font "Botanical" had this crossed olive branch for a character that looked...interesting. So while I kept the basic layout I wanted to use (a variant of Melting), I littered the design with that character (it's the lowercase "x", BTW) which gave as classical look to the design. This in turn informed the use of Baskerville in all caps for the major headlines.
I also took the opportunity to try out some techniques I had seen used in other blogs around the web. So there's the FIR used for the end-of-post graphic (it replaces the text "-x-"). Over there are the fake columns as explained by Dan Cederholm in an article in "A List Apart." And over in that corner is a half-baked attempt to adapt the two-column navigation used to great effect over at Mezzoblue.
I'm happy with the design overall, though I know there's so much to improve on. What's your take?