There’s a new design in town. There are seven other skins here, but this is the first one that leaves the old layout completely behind. The others are all variations on a single design.

I’ve taken to calling this new skin the “Starsky & Hutch Go Flying” theme. It has a certain hip 70’s panache to it, don’t you think? The jets careening around at odd angles bring to mind my instrument flight training. Those of you who are IFR-rated pilots will know what I’m talking about.
Development was not without its challenges — it took some convincing to get Gallery to read the cookie set by the new PHP skinning method.

And Gallery provided another challenge: the Starsky skin’s graphic design was not meant to be flexible in width, but the photo gallery’s full-size images can be over 1000 pixels wide. Like this. A solution was implemented, but different browsers handle this in different ways. It looks most elegant in IE, but even in Opera and Netscape the design degrades quite gracefully for a fixed-width layout.

I’m starting to understand why very few people combine Movable Type and Gallery while making them skinnable with a common graphic design. I’ve also developed a new appreciation for the old layout’s elegance since it has always played quite nicely with Gallery.

A special thank you to Julie for the spiffy new layout!

Anyway, what do you think of the new look? I’m considering removing a couple of the older skins. Which ones should I take off the table?