Complete Style

These are the guidelines for layouts to be included as officially supported themes. Designers of layouts offered for individual users to load as custom stylesheets need not feel bound by them.

New themes will be released under the GPL, as per IJ policy.

This means that you must be willing to release your design to be loaded, copied, or diced up for parts by pretty much the whole world. It does not mean that you will not receive credit for your design work. You will be explicitly credited as the designer via this community and any authorial identification you may include in your code (eg your name at the top of the style sheet). You are still the copyright holder; it's just that, under the GPL, you explicitly allow the copying and/or modification of your design code.

Make sure any images you use are legal.

This is a corollary of the first guideline. Make sure you have the right to use whatever background images you are using, and release them in a GPL design. The Open Clip Art Library and stock.xchng can both supply images on suitable licensing terms.

Make sure any images you use are legal in a web template.

The thing is, most commercial stock photo sites will give you free use of any image you buy for a web page. The licensing for use in a web template is either hugely more expensive or else completely forbidden. Something like a journal style counts as a web template.

Make your layout legible down to 800x600px.

I don't ask anyone to optimize for that small a size anymore, but plenty of people are still stuck with screens of that resolution, so try to make sure that your layout doesn't break down when you take it down that small.

Try to stay away from set font sizes.

Along the same lines, the vast range of browser resolutions out there means that, for example, Arial 12pt will be huge on some screens and tiny on others. Do what you can to use proportional font sizing instead.

Make sure you can go up and down at least two font sizes without breaking your layout

Again, along the same lines, with different resolutions and different viewing preferences, come a lot of different size settings. Be sure you can toggle both up and down a few font sizes without anything breaking or overflowing. This can take a bit of ingenuity when you're using image backgrounds for headers and such, but it's worth it.

Make sure your layout is compatible with at least the most recent versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

As browsers get more standards compliant, of course, this gets easier. I recommend also making it compatible with Linux browsers such as Konqueror and Galeon. This should not be difficult, if you design to, or even close to, W3C standards, and manage to be compatible with the above listed browsers. If you can make them compatible as far back as IE5 and Firefox 1, this is a really nice added bonus. I highly recommend Browsershots for layout testing.

Keeping all that in mind, go for it!