Kukuicup Design - pt II

So last week's meeting went pretty much as expected - the PM tells me my theme is "too gloomy" and reminds him of vampires.  Additionally, the PM agreed that there was "too much stuff" in the theme.css file, and instructed the groups to make a separate "style.css" file to contain all the non-theme related items (e.g. items needed to override/negate previously defined elements).  A discussion took place about not meeting as often.  The PM said he didn't like the idea and felt that frequent meetings (and thereby feedback) were important to the rapid prototyping methodology.  Interestingly enough, all our meetings this week were cancelled. 

I spent this week pulling extraneous elements out of theme.css and migrating them into style.css.  To the top of my theme.css file I added:

@import url('style.css');

I later discovered that issues arose when I sometimes removed elements from theme.css which were not defined by syle.css.  This resulted in certain elements having their settings defaulted to whatever was defined by the original kukuicup theme.  To resolve the issue, I essentially copied whatever css items were necessary to make the page (including both theme and style elements) into style.css, and then re-defined the same item in theme.css.  This lets theme.css have first-priority over what an element looks like, but if I accidentally (or lazily) fail to define a property of an element, style.css will still render it.  This occurs because I have the above nifty little import statement at the top of my theme.css page.

Another issue was that sometimes I wanted to change what was in the style.css file, but style.css was used by more than just one theme.  This made making style changes nearly impossible.  The answer was to have a separate style.css file for each theme.  While this is sub-optimal, it gives me the greatest flexibility over design options.

Anyway, to break up this giant wall of text, I'll show off a couple of the themes that I worked on this week.

"Theme-2"
Aiming for a "less gloomy", vampire-free theme.

"Theme-4"

We later got an email from the PM instructing us to createa "clean" white-based theme

If you're wondering what happened to "theme-3", trust me, your better off not knowing...