Earlier this morning while going through my normal morning ritual (coffee, email, rss, etc) I noticed a new post by Matt Mullenweg regarding a new site design for his personal blog. I thought the old design was great, but Matt’s designer Nicolò Volpato has once again outdone himself with this new design for Spring. The new color palette is much brighter than the previous red and gray them from before, especially the header.

The header of the new design can only be described as a very colorful combination of shapes and patterns that has been distressed to give it a rough feeling. It reminds me of wallpaper that you might find in your grandmother’s guest room, but much more tasteful. The distressed look is carried over into the different icons and buttons throughout the site. My most favorite example of this look is in the mouseover state for the navigation bar…a simple pencil scribbled circle around the text.

Of course being the inquisitive type that I am I had to dive further into the new design and how it was built. The entire theme is straight up coding mastery! The entire theme is built from only 23 images; which are all built into the style sheets. Using the web developer plugin for Firefox, I turned off the style sheets and the only images it shows are the ones displayed in the posts…it’s 100% XHTML/CSS no embedded images pretty impressive.

Matt has changed up and added some new features to the site as well. The photos in his image gallery are much larger now, some are around 840 pixels or larger. Matt classifies them as “Imagine it like going HD, you’ll definitely enjoy it more on broadband”. This is amazingly the first version of his site that is all Wordpress and WP2.5 to boot. Gravatars are more prominent in the comments section now and allow for the different iterations of gravatars: wavatars, monsterid and identicon.

There are many more features…too many for me to list here, but if you’re a website design junkie like myself I suggest you check out the new design for yourself.

~ GrandmasterB