Somehow I forgot to mention this on my blog, but a week or two ago I ported a theme from OSWD primarily for use on a friend’s site; as I got it ready, I realized I had only another hour (or 2 or 3..) of work to make it a fully usable theme, so I did.

The theme is called Antique Modern and the original is by Aaron Ganshow AKA wildleaf.

It uses curved, shadow boxes, but where the boxes join they are nice and straight. My biggest complaint is that the padding on the far right is a bit narrower than on the far left, which is just a teeny bit off. My second biggest complaint is that it didn’t have any really native places to put some Drupalisms, like the search box, logo, slogan or mission. I managed to get the slogan in in a way that I find appealing, but the search bogs just kind of sits there and the mission is pretty boring, and there’s no logo support at al.

When I asked the author if he minded his work being GPL’d to post it on Drupal, it was an easy decision for him. He is a member of a community writing site (and, I believe, proprietor) running on Drupal. In fact, he said he would tweak the design a little bit to be more Drupal friendly, so at some point in the future there may be a second version.

The friend of mine that I designed the site for did a little color editing on his images; he’s not done yet, but when he is I will likely include them as an alternate version. If other people want to create other color schemes that are pleasing to the eye, I’d be happy to go with that too; I like this one for the basic layout and design, and the color scheme is very much independent of that.

There are some problems with the theme. Notably, the administration screens can be too wide for it, and z-indexing can cause the right hand of tables to get obscured. I probably need to figure out a way to do something about that — probably by forcing a simpler, fluid theme on administrative pages.

Also, I put the left sidebar in the right; actually, I should’ve just removed the left sidebar entirely. I figured out how to do that later. A future version probably will.