A few thoughts on the new design:

When I was brainstorming through some designs I fell on a couple of really obvious paths. The first was a change for me (change is good) - bright colors. I was working with the Online Color Schemer and the Color Schemer Studio demo from the same company to come up with a bright combination that didn't hurt your eyes. The 'Manly Pink #1' stylesheet at eclecticism was an example of something on the very edge between being bright and hurting my eyes. I suppose the word I should use is 'bold' rather than 'bright' since this color idea spawned mostly from the bold colors of Justwatchthesky.

The second try was not too much of a change. I had extended a center-column, drop-shadowed grey design from the old ~500px to ~750px. I was using a lot of grey gradients which I think are very 'in' right now but... it's been done. In fact, I did it with the last design. It is definitely time for something new but that would have been the clean and simple way out.

The third was another new idea for my design standpoint. Blogs are very often centered on the page nowadays and it seems to be easy to make a design look half-decent when it's centered (easy is considered within reason, of course). Left-formatted pages almost seem like a thing of the past and since our natural tendancy is to dismiss many old design standards, I find that it can be very hard to create a left-formatted page that maintains a good sense of style to it. A few people have done some very awesome left-formatted pages and this leads me right in to my last point...

Pages that are designed to have a sense of 'real' to them are very stylish if you can pull it off. The example that I keep going back to in my mind is the blog of one Jason Santa Maria [insert obligatory Philadelphia comment here - I'm not too thrilled with the place at the moment]. Simply, the blog imitates the design of a novel cover with stains, tears and all. The key for me was not to imitate the cover of a book for my own design but to contemplate the imitation of everyday objects and realism as a design trend. What else could I create as a design that gives a sense of realism and style to the reader? Here is where my thought comes to an abrupt halt for the moment. I'm still contemplating objects around me in trying to figure out which might work best as a design but I'm going to try to work with one without forgetting to keep an eye out for better ideas. That concept is that of a CD or MP3 player skin which has been done before, surely. The question is how well I can integrate it with the concepts of a modern blog rather than just a useless skin for typical website.

I'll have updates as soon as I come up with something interesting design-wise.