the
Old Fashioned

Thanks for your hard work.

Congratulations to the winning! Well deserved in my opinion.

I checked out the demo of the theme at:
http://media2.smashingmagazine.com/images/type-layouts/experimental/

It looks very good. It is better to read on larger screens, although I would not make it wider.

While the readability is better with the bigger font, the pages do not look that clean and simple anymore for some reason. It may be my low resolution of 1280, though.

The thing is, that with such a minimalist theme, everything matters. I just spend some time going back and forth with Clix and Experimental… And I only realized just now, how well balanced Clix is…

I do not know very much about typing and fonts, but one of my dearest friends (http://www.touchbranding.com/) opened my senses to it a little. What is very good at Clix, is the empty space.

And there lies its biggest challenge. Out of the top of my head, I would say, that experimental seems to cramp my 1280×800 too much, because there is not enough whitespace left at the borders – I guess, this is what you mean by canvas…

While I like the enlargement of your posts in the header and footer of this very page, for some reason, the homepage view kinda disrupt me a little. … The main page is a little nervous. I had the same feeling when I started to post the first articles, and I think the reason is, that when the photos break the frame in a post listing, it is a little too much.

I resorted for quite boring and very short “appetizers” for the posts, using the “more” tag, but resulting in a quite tidy frontpage (although without any pictures)
I like very much the clean “about” page of yours, and this is what I tried to achieve with my simplification. I may get back to making the “appetizers” longer, so that I gain more white space again, but will not break it with pictures. If I insert images, I would do it like you on experimental with the same wide as the text – But in the article itself, I would probably do it, because there is no additional text on the left (from other articles) that would disrupt and irritate.

This “nervous white space” was one of the things, that threw me off your theme initially. Clix has a character, one has to get used to a little. I tried a lot of themes, and I think, that yours is one of the most difficult to get right, because the minimalism shows every little misalignment or “error”.

Strangely, when I look at Experiment homepage, there are also images breaking out of the writing, but I do not feel that “nervous” about it. It may have something to do with the wideness of the theme.

I slowly start to understand, why you said that you are neither happy with 960, nor with 1060….

Now, why did you NOT design one of those mega-bloated,flashy themes again?

Hei Rodrigo.
You are the real stuff. Considering that Smashing is one of the best blog right now, it’s quite achievement to get the third place. The theme itself, I don’t have any complain about it. it was a near perfection. I guess it says how much effort and thought that you have put on your theme.
Congratulation.

Any ETA on the new version? Is it going to be significantly different from the Experimental version seen on Smashing? Looking forward to it… thanks and congrats.