The nested coloured borders always made reading your blog feel like playing a game on and old Atari, or perhaps the old VIC-20 I had as my first computer.

The blog has this kind of old-school, retro look to it. I kinda like it, but it might wear off in a few days... Though I was used to the old colors, they did make my eyes hurt now and then.

There's an easier way to find variants of HTML colors. It's Eric Meyer's fabulously easy to use Color Blender: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/

Give it a spin.

Having been used to the old colors, I can't keep the word "dull" from coming to my mind now. ;-)

I honestly prefer the old style. This seems too plain, with too little contrast.

Asa, are you looking for cascades? I haven't tried it in ages, but it is part of nvu now.

i think people were more concerned with the range rather than intensity of the colours. blue, green, red, yellow all at once... perhaps if u picked just a few complementary colours?

Bah! I liked panda more! :p

Hi,

Maybe the Webdeveloper Toolbar can help you? There is a function "Edit CSS", and there you can change the css-File in a window and see what you are doing immediately.

HTH
Manuel

When you first put up the colorfull scheme, you had a optional style-sheet (from some brian/brat/dan or some sutch) which was really nice as far as i remember.

Very nice.. And one smart looking dude too !!

I like the new design but would love the little panda back.

Nice colours - who's the scary guy?!! ;-)

Asa, I tend to use Color Schemer to help out with color generation for some sites. They have both a downloadable payware application and a free online generator. You can tweak the colors and grey them out as much as you want.

These colors are better, but they don't look good with the title and date font. Go for a more 70's rounded-curvy font and it will look a lot better, IMHO.

Much better.

Now if you would only type your headlines with capital first letters, and use "text-transform: lowercase;" instead. That way, you can keep your lowercase design, yet keep your feeds nicely headlined ;)

I didn't like the old colours, but this looks like the old colours dying. Have we gone from salad days to compost days?

In all honesty these colors are extremely dull. The old colors may have been garish, but at least they had some character. I'd suggest getting at least one brighter color and maybe one richer color (a darkish blue, green, something with a little more feeling) into the layout and seeing where you can get from there.

I, of course, know nothing about graphic design, which is why I'm so qualified to give it. ;-)

Asa, the visited link colors are hard to see (in the sidebar, at least). Or maybe it's the /un/visited links.

How about we just say links in general in the sidebar? ;-)

Anyway, overall I like it. Much easier on the eyes.

As Joen said above, it's better to add the style "text-transform: lowercase;" on the headlines than to actually use all lower case letters. I used that css-property for Firefox Help when it was still hosted on texturizer.net.

One other comment about the style of your blog. The problem, I think, was not the saturation of the colors, but the mix of them all. The general advice is usually to mix two or three different colors, not five or six.

Fwiw, what makes me visit your blog on a regular basis is not the style, but the content.