Mr. Scott said:
The focus this time was on readability and the content itself (i.e. the articles).
Some fun facts:
I used a web site to calculate total server requests/total page sizes for the old SOTT and the new SOTT design.
With the new theme, total requests to the server (to load the homepage) dropped from 200 to 135, or a 32.5% reduction.
Total downloaded bytes dropped from 1,749,398 to 1,130,557, or a 35.4% reduction.
In plain English, that means MORE SPEED!!!
The other focus of this change was to greatly simplify the design of the site such that we could actually have Themes again. The old design was so darn complicated that themes would have been an insane amount of work.
I'm already working on the 2nd theme, which shall be called:
Ice Age
:D