Themes

Posted by marbux 01 Nov 2005 03:25 GMT-0000

> Ah!
>
> Im glad someone likes the new theme I made there!
>
I'm very impressed by the tikigod.css theme. That's coming from one who was a professional typographer for over 20 years before a (hopefully) mid-life career switch. It may be the best distributed Tiki theme yet in terms of balancing accessibility considerations and aesthetics for non-handicapped site visitors.

I particularly like that the information in the outer Tikigod columns does not visually overpower the content in the center column, as is done in so many Tiki themes. That detracts from the viewer's very purpose for navigating to the particular page, to view its unique content.

At the same time, Tikigod gives just enough contrast to important page organizational elements like title bars that they serve their purpose without overshadowing text. I appreciate the focus on black, white, and grey. Color is overused on web pages, IMHO, particularly for sites that are built around presentation of text.

My one potential issue with Tikigod is that it eschews the traditional blue for hyperlinks in favor of underlining alone. Most folks who cruise the internet expect hyperlinks to be contrasted in blue and underlined or in blue alone, It takes quite a few visits to a Tikigod site to train the eye to recognize hyperlinks without any color.

We have a site still under development using Polaris, but intend to upgrade soon now that 1.92 is out. I've put off switching to Tikigod until we make that change, so I'll have to wait to experiment. But right now, it certainly looks like we will build from Tikigod once the switch is made. We are currently using whitebluegrey.css.

So once again, kudos to Tikigod's designer. Thank you very much.