So I if you looked at my website within the last few hours or so you might have seen a very different theme. It was a grunge like style. My goal was to try and use PNGs for different layering and styles. Evenually I wanted the background to dynamically change depending on a post’s categories and tags. However, I ran into some obvious drawbacks.
Here is a screenshot of the design:
It was a refreshing change to play around with from my previous web design work. However, I soon found my pages approaching 2-4 MB in size due too the large PNG files used to gain the transparent look. The problem is basically that a image with large dimensions is going to be a great deal larger than a GIF or JPEG. Of course you get the great alpha transparencies with PNGs, but to be sligly glutonous with dimensions can be extremely costly in file size.
I didn’t finish the layout, just the general parts, when I realized I had designed it all wrong. When I sliced up my images, I should have designed and planned to use jpegs or gifs for 99% of the design. That way I could just use PNGs for the very few times it was absolutely necessary. Seeing how I didn’t want to keep this design permanately I decided not to go back and fix it. I just reverted to my old theme.
If anyone is interested in how I did some of the styles, I’ve zipped up the PSD and Theme files for download. Feel free to use them as you see fit. I also relyed on this article for textures, fonts, photoshop brushes, etc. to use on this design.
Files
Justin Carmony 