Practicality

Theme is Citrusy by rising.

I like this layout a great deal. Even with a vibrant colour scheme like the theme I chose, the content still take centre stage.

The very simple design of horizontal lines and borders aids in presenting the content, not detracts from it.

There's some good spacing on the modules and everything is well spaced.

I don't like the blobbed together Tertiary modules.

The calendar--another wide one, looks not bad.

Excellent design that could take a host of colour schemes.

Refried Tablet

Theme is Vintage Modern by rising.

If I remember right, this is an adaptation or clone of an LJ theme.

I never noticed layouts on LJ, other than to despise the ones that blanked out the navigation links or only put them at the top of the page.

Nice clean design. I like this sidebar a lot.

Modules in tertiary stack vertically, so I presume they'd look horrible with a whole bunch.

Everything is simple and uncluttered and not overdesigned.

Room for a lot of colour themes with this one.

Skittlish Dreams

Theme is by sarken

My username overflows the sidebar at my 16px default font with a 14px minimum. If I were choosing styles, I wouldn't look any farther.

I like the very modern look and the clever use of shadows and geometric shapes.

And hallelujah! Finally a style that just prevents you from putting anything in tertiary in two column set up. That beats letting you do it, but styling it so it won't work.

Distinctive and striking layout that needs a little attention to scalability.

This is an excellent layout for style makers to look at for tips on how to use s2 to customize your layout and extend the layout beyond the reading page.

I got some fabulous ideas from it that helped me refine mine.

Stepping Stones

At the Hop by Musyc.

I personally find all the overlapping boxes a bit busy, but within each box, things are spaced very well.

Content is balanced well with design and there's good variation in colours available.

Pet peeve, and I see this in a lot of layouts: putting a colour background on an element that contains headings and not putting any padding on the element. If your text is just flowing along with no other backgrounds, that's awesome, but text butting right up to the edge of a coloured background is uncomfortable looking.

This is also an issue with colour blocked sidebars that have no padding or margins on them that then but right up to the edge of the screen. Even on a mobile device--which none of these layouts are for, some padding will fit.

Nothing overdesigned here--the focus is really on colour combinations--and the foundation is good.

Sunday Morning

Theme is Red Squiggle by Regna

I like this use of background images a lot because it's not pushing the content down just for decoration.

It's very nicely designed with a cohesive look across pages.

I notice here that there's no current style on the navigation menu. This is something only a few styles use, but I think it's a key piece of communication to the user and shouldn't be overlooked.

This layout lends itself to all sorts of themes in a lot of colours.

Tranquility III

Theme is Shallows by dancing_serpent.

I've used this layout a lot, so I'm not sure what to say about it.

It's got good typography--lacking in line-height like everything based on Tabula Rasa is my only complaint.

There's good spacing and it only needs padding in a few places.

The style is bugged for putting on background images via the wizard, which is a shame as it lends itself to it nicely.

The icon sitting in content looks weird to me when it's on the right, but a lot of layouts have that issue.

Nice clean look, easy to do colour themes for, simple design that works well.

Transmorgrified

Theme is Grey Days by asenathwaite.

This has the look of a couple of other styles, it's got the modules coloured individually which always makes me think of old LJ styles.

It's easy to read, easy to colour theme, has no big missteps and the same issues/features of all the other similar layouts.

Icon's up in the header, which makes it flow nicely, and there's some clunky spacing with topnav.

Content pretty evenly balanced with theme here.

Zesty

The oddball.

It's kind of cool looking. Very minimalist and content so far out in front it's hard to find the modules.

I think this would be popular to theme if the code got standardized.

Wondering if I should volunteer to do it? It would be an interesting intellectual exercise.

Tabula Rasa

Saves this one for last.

Tabula Rasa is the only layout I'd ever theme. And yet no one does it, and the few that are there are just colour themes.

On the other hand, TR is the base of most of the other layouts, so it gets used. I've come to understand how this happened.

From my perspective a style has three parts:

1. The layout, which is where things are positioned and the core typography.

2. The skin, or the design or whatever you want to call the borders and backgrounds, the box-shadows and font effects, the position refinements--like the icon biting into the corner of an entry, etc.

3. The colour scheme and the background images.

Now, there's overlap between those--what's padding is it layout or skin? And what's skin, does it include the number of different colours and where they're used, or is that colour scheme?

But for me, 2 and 3 are what a theme is and 1 is the layout. But, what's happened as styles got developed is that 1 and 2 are the layout and usually the theme is only 3.

And there's technical reasons for this--if you want to have a border, you have to have the property set in the layout layer, and so on. But, Tabula Rasa has all that flexibility, and it's a natural for CSS only designers to go to town on, and they haven't done that. The CSS only people don't seem to ever want to step out of private styles.

Maybe DW should just accept that and set up a different way for CSS only styles to get made public. Set up a static site with live previews. Something. Paging through a couple of comms of code that's never been vetted seems like a lot of work.