Last night I decided it was time for this blog to put on some new clothes. Do you think it looks natty in red?

Elmastudio’s Yoko theme caught my eye because of the technical details. Change the size of your browser window (or visit on a small-screened device) and it will automatically reflow the design to fit, shifting side columns to the bottom at intelligent breakpoints. Under the hood it also uses HTML5 and CSS3, which I am beginning to explore in my own work; having them built into my blog theme will help me get to grips with how to implement them.

Why red? That came from the two images I decided to use:

Both of these came from trips to RHS Rosemoor (in December 2009 and December 2010 respectively). I picked a shortlist from my collection and tried several cropped to the size required as a header graphic for the theme (1102px x 350px). The Hamamelis flower worked most effectively (with a little polish to remove noise from the background and to enhance the detail after resizing) and so I looked for a background image that displayed complementary colours (once rotated, cropped and turned into a tiling image to remove the blues and whites of the original). That is why the key colour is now red; it was dictated by the photos.

If you remember the previous appearance, that also had a flower in the header and a tiled bark image in the background, so I still have a strong link to my earlier design intuition even as I move forward. I have also added a small tweak to Yoko’s CSS to give rounded corners to the main page; I will probably work in a few more subtleties as I continue to develop my skills.