A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a dingy but servicable apartment in Prague whinging about the Open Source Web Design site. Since I went back there the other day and used one of their designs to make a site I run look passable, I thought it was only fair to point out that the quality of designs there have improved a lot, and many seem to be quite good at being reasonable implementations of current standards-compliant lightweight web design in the blog mode. It’s still a little sketchy on the idea of licences or conditions of re-use though.
This sounds like faint praise mostly because it is. I’m a little bit wary of the thin centre column, still life image at the top, smaller navigation bar at the side etc etc trend mostly because I feel like I’ve been slapped around with it a lot. I suppose there’s a part of me that looks forward to the day that web design becomes more like typesetting in terms of its intrusiveness. However, that said, they really are quite reasonable designs, no longer in any way a shock to the system. I’ll probably use a couple of them to re-style puzzling.org and andrew.puzzling.org.