Being a front end person, I usually feel awkwardly caught between two worlds that I'm sort of a part of, but not quite fully integrated with. I'm not a designer and I can't do all develpment work. I'm always trying to branch out into more development work. However, I've been feeling creative and the urge struck me to also dip my toe into the design waters, just to see how I would fare.

All of the work I do is corporate, so there is hardly room to use all of the fun, "cutting edge" features I read about. I also adore color but never get to play with it.

They say you should write what you know - so to start, I decided to design for someone like myself. Royal is a blog theme that is young, simple and somewhat ornate. It uses such fancy things as CSS drop shadows and RGBA opacity to create what I hope is a subtle polished look. This theme will be significantly less pretty in old browsers and IE8 until it supports opacity (if ever) - I'm ok with this. I think that the people I intend to use this theme will be ok with that, too.

It's not a UX masterpiece but I am very pleased with the outcome and I would love to hear feedback on the design. I hope to feel inspired to open up Photoshop again soon!

Check out the demo site for Royal: Royal
Download Royal: http://drupal.org/project/royal