This is the winning design for $chix0r's WordPress Contest.

Basically this theme was designed from the ground up, with some generous inspiration from Joen Asmussen's Fauna.

I think the challenge here was stepping away from modern web design trends in order to create something a bit more messy and grungy. My original mock-ups featured a blood red bottom half which was supposed to follow a 'Murder in a Sewer' theme (don't ask where that idea came from). After talking with Fiona ($chix0r) she preferred a more uniform colour scheme so the red was changed to a dull green, so it's the sewer before the murder!

As a bit of a bonus I decided to keep the blood theme in which may be selected via the WordPress Administration panel.

The 'big thing' about this design is the split layout, which puts a bit of a twist on the modern version of this. As a lot of sites are beginning to use the horizontal divide as a revamped 'sidebar', keeping relevant sub-info on the other-side of this divide. In this design however I decided to bring the 'divide' into the actual design a bit more and thus it's become the divider for the comments section and when a comment-less page is displayed, the very minimal footer resides in this bar. Even though I have this divide I made a conscious decision to keep the traditional sidebar, that's what makes this design a little different from other.

One drawback is the fact that the grunge images are subject to large file sizes, this is something I could not avoid so I tried my best to keep load times down and image quality at it's best. I think I've managed a pretty decent balance.

The code is CSS & XHTML 1.0 Trans compliant and on ancient browsers which don't support CSS the code deconstructs nicely maintaining a useful and readable format.

The site should be up in a day or two at angelswillfall.net.