I’ve been thinking about creating my own theme for WordPress for a while now — for over 1 year to be honest. —while looking at a few interesting designs to use as a base. I’m very interested in UX and UI Usability, but lousy at drawing and creating nice graphics. (I can use Photoshop and Fireworks, but the result is never what I had in my head, more like thinking about a Ferrari and ending up with a rusted VW Beetle.)
Here are a few designs I found interesting:

• Minimalist by Mahmoud Khaled at Six Revisions
• WordPress by =sinthux at DeviantArt
• Green by ~klosdafrau at DeviantArt

I like gray/dark professional looking styles and just love carbon steel, like iNove has.

As Usability and CSS expert, I like to use CSS grids. But most grids are based on hardcoded ‘px’ values or ‘%’. Both have downsided. Using ‘px’ makes the design scale badly, even though most modern browsers scale entire pages and not just the text, some browsers make mistakes when ‘px’ is used. Using ‘%’ will make most part scale better, but it’s harder to work with. Most Usability experts and guidelines suggest using ‘em’. I’m not going into the details of the ‘px’ versus ‘em’ debate, but I too prefer ‘em’. Today I found some time to invest into looking into the issue of CSS frameworks/grids and ‘em’ again and found YUI 2 Grids CSS. This seems to be a very nice grid system using ‘em’, so I’m definitely going to try that when creating my new theme.

While reading about YUI 2′s Grids CSS and took a look att some examples. Using Google Chrome and looking at the examples, my chrome asked if it should translate the examples from Spanish. Since the examples use Lorem Ipsum text, there is no Spanish present, mistake 1. You can tell the automatic language detection in Chrome what language the page is in by selecting the right language from the drop-down menu. Shame there’s no ‘Latin’ in the list, mistake 2. Quite an amusing bug, but also quite astonishing that Latin is not in Google Translate’s repertoire.