Now that there are a substantial number of drop-in sandbox skins for differing verions of the Sandbox, I'm working on a catalog of all the designs, so that wordpress.com users and other sandboxers can find designs easily.  There have been several requests in the wordpress.com forums for a list like this, and the Sandbox Wiki seems as good a place for it as any.

This skin is for Wordpress.com Users. feel free to use this skin ‘as is’. the images are hosted on wordpress.com, so it’s no different than hosting them yourself. If you host your own blog, please get the zipped version of the skin.

Credits

A List Apart's article on typesetting (followed to the letter because IE sucks)
Joen Asmussen's brilliant idea about adding columns without touching the markup
Dezinerfolio's web2.0 layer styles
KDE's Oxygen icons project
Datestamps inspired by the cover of Eero Saarinen, designed by CoDe Communication and Design

Description

Designed for the Sandbox Designs Competition, this CSS design is an experiment in layout. There are two sidebars stacked vertically. The second sidebar stacks horizonally, visually making 2 sidebars out of 1.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

Installation

Select the Sandbox-10 theme (currently on page 4).  Then open the download link below, and copy the contents into the Edit CSS box, Making sure to check the "Start from scratch and just use this" box.  If you'd like to customize the graphics, be sure to check out the Photoshop files, which you can abuse to your heart's content.

Download

Walk in the Shadows CSS

Andy has finally gotten the Sandbox updated on Wordpress.com.  Both of my designs for the competition were too tightly focused on version 1.0¹, so I've been eagerly awaiting the upgrade.

This skin is for Wordpress.com Users. feel free to use this skin ‘as is’. the images are hosted on wordpress.com, so it’s no different than hosting them yourself. If you host your own blog, please get the zipped version of the skin.

Credits

Some abuse of a stock photo by Ryan Ford.
Based on "for elaine", which became archGFX v02.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

This design is dual-licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. Where possible, please include a link to this page for attribution.

Installation

Select the Sandbox-10 theme (currently on page 4).  Then open the download link below, and copy the contents into the Edit CSS box, Making sure to check the "Start from scratch and just use this" box.

Download

Promised Land CSS

1. abuse of #access as a wrapper for #menu, etc. (back ↩)

(click for the fullsize, it's awesome)

I love last.fm. And I love data visualization. Music + Data = Supah Sexeh. That's why I read Emo + Beer = Busted Career: P4M-style snark is boring without the graphs and charts).

A couple months ago there was that Waterloo Engineering project that made pie charts of how eclectic your tastes were. Nothing wrong with it, just not exciting. that, and it could only connect to last.fm for like a week, it tells everyone they don't have charts now.

I first saw Lee Byron's histograph on information aesthetics, and was seriously tempted to pay the man to make me one of them, although at the same time, I wondered if it was possible to extract the data mechanically. Fortunately, someone much smarter than me had the same thought, so you can get your own wave histogram chart here.

The history chart is fantastic. I love the way it reflects my life. you can clearly see when I changed jobs in August 2006, and stopped being able to listen to my own music at work. I ran the chart seperately for just that period, but even at that, it's a pretty dense year and a half:

Unfortunately that lull, despite the attempted resurgence in December, means that there's little documentation of the gradual shift in my tastes away from indie, and towards metal. When summer hours started this June, the list of bands is almost completely different:

what's abundantly clear, though, is how I listen to music. I jump from obsession to obsession, with little continuity in between. Dredg doesn't show up as an even ribbon, just a more common hotspot. Opeth is the exception, since their songs are so long. They rarely peek(or peak) out of the chart, but they're always present. There's probably some better graph to show the frequency and repetition in my taste, rather than ebb and flow. the pictures are still hot, though.

h/t jark