What news! and my theme inspiration

I have a text file started on my desktop called "Blog" where I just jot down ideas for posts; this week's idea is simple:

- Blog post how I created my design
	- taxo links inspired by we-make-money-not-art
	- post format inspired by coolhunting.com

But before I get to that, I wanted to celebrate a little. At Northern Voice I decided that I'm going to try and do one blog post a week. I figured it would be a small enough goal to get going and I wanted to see what this blogging thing was about. This is post 5, the end of my first month, and I'm right on track!

Anyway, I thought I'd go over where some of the inspiration for this theme comes from as well as give some direction as to where it is going.

The taxonomy links were heavily inspired from we-make-money-not-art.com. Let's compare:

vs.

I really like how the text goes off the background, similar to a rough highlighting job. For we-make-money-not-art, the position of this information helps solve two problems: makes it really obvious that this is tagging/titling (especially by breaking tags into discrete blocks) and saves space. I decided not to do this over top of images as I wasn't sure how many posts would include them. I also didn't want images as a required piece of content.

Enter my inspiration from coolhunting.com:

Here they've seemingly solved all of my problems! Now I don't have to put information over images and this gives a good place for taxonomy/tags, service links, read more link, and comment info. It doesn't interfere with the content and is positioned so that it is really obvious which info belongs to which piece of content.

You might also notice that both of these sites are fixed width and have a lot of content to throw at you.

Now for the future. The most important piece that is missing right now is my blogroll. I think it's important to give what little link love I can and hopefully I can think up an elegant way to integrate this into the footer. This seems like the best place and it might leave some room for links to my web places (eg. flickr, twitter, facebook...).

My next thought for visual improvement is rounded corners on the top and bottom green blocks. I've also looked into stretching the green banner across the top.

I hope this gives some insight and I would be interested to hear where other people get their design ideas! Design suggestions are definitely welcome.

Oh, and I've added OpenID support which you can currently find here. Need to find a way to make this inline with comments where it's far more relevant.