the white bar along the left side doesn't extend all the way to the bottom for me on ff. and the pink burned out my retinas, but that may be because i had three hours sleep last night...

Personally... I love it. It's just my style, and I love the pop art look to it. Build in some content to it and polish it off. Not all templates here have to be centered around blogs or commercial sites.

It's all hand made from scratch. It has completely different coding (which I am very proud of because its only text formatting, easy to work with its almost just like making a word document, ZERO divs).

The two designs have a different purpose to. Sofamade's is a splash and this one.. well it's has a purpose of its own lol.

Now I can understand where your coming from. I take precautions to prevent ripping. I'll show you the process in which I created this design. I browsed a css showcase site, and decided i liked the unique simplicity, I took down the hex code of the main colour and had the basic image in my mind. I waited three days so parts of the design became fuzzy in my mind. The only problem is I am very good at remembering visual elements and it is indeed extremely similar.

There are nearly as many validation errors as lines of HTML

I'm sorry but I have to agree with Neuen... That's definitely a rip. If someone found the template here and then came across sofamade's website, they would definitely think that they downloaded it and just changed the fonts. It doesn't matter if the code is different, it's the design that most users see.

That 'template' could seriously damage their reputation so I think it is extremely unfair for you to release this especially without getting consent from them first.

I was also about to point out the amount of validation errors but see that Christopher got there before me. It's quite surprising that something so simple with so little code has missing/redundant tags in it

The design is lovely... but that's credit to sofamade really.

Sean: a 'rip' doesn't mean that you stole any code, but the style is almost identical. mabey if you moved the white stripe to the right, and change the link to a darker orange, turquoise or purple, and made other minor changes (like adding some navigation), it could be more unique.

updated the template a bit

My ancient monitor shows that colour as eye-blistering bright.

I need to work on the text colours.

The darker i make the colour, the more it loses the pop art look, but I am fully aware that it will hurts peoples eyes right now and the text is somewhat hard to read.

So R.I.P. must be Rip In Progress?

I didn't see it before, but I think it's quite different now. Changing the footer somehow would help further.

two column templates are popular because that's the most logical design for a web site - a header at the top, maybe a horizontal menu, and then a sidebar and the main content. the problem here was this is such a unique and different design, and sean's version was far too similar to the site that inspired it.

think about it: you have created a completely unique web design for your company (as this was - i have never seen anything like it before now), but then someone releases an almost identical design as a free template. suddenly your unique design is available to anyone who cares to download the conveniently offered zip file.

I've seen it done somewhere else. It wasn't Sofamade. The colours were black and white but the concept was essentially the same. Big title with plain text and inverse link colours. Not sure where now. Maybe it was a tee shirt

Not that I'm saying anybody copied or anything but it's not exactly unique.

@Sean: I can see you are looking for inspiration and liked this concept. Maybe you should avoid being inspired by something so simplistic. Even changing colours, it's still going to be the same thing. There isn't exactly a lot you can do to give it your own twist, if you see what I mean. Think how can you make it your own? What could the next step be? How can you stamp your originality onto it?

Could you actually claim to own such a simplistic idea?

I think most of the designs on OD could be compared with others. There isn't a lot new to do with images, CSS and XHTML that hasn't already been done.

Also if anybody is going to rip a design then you best choose somebody who hasn't got loads of money. That way they will be unlikely to sue you

Which version of html is the sarcasm tag in?

Hehe. and maybe a <humor> tag for when our comment isn't to be taken too seriously, would be a good idea for those who don't quite get the use of smiles.

Damn. Neither tag validates. How useful would they have been?

you could also make it a fluid width design - it wouldn't exactly change the appearance a lot, but it would make it more usable to those with lower screen resolutions. and a design like this would be easy to make fluid. i get a horizontal scroll bar on it when i resize my browser to 1024x768, which is the most popular resolution iirc.

yeh aren't exams fun? :D
i suppose i should get back to studying.

Posted By: ainslie@Sean: I can see you are looking for inspiration and liked this concept. Maybe you should avoid being inspired by something so simplistic. Even changing colours, it's still going to be the same thing. There isn't exactly a lot you can do to give it your own twist, if you see what I mean.

very well said .. couldn't agree more.

Maybe the rule should be not to watch at the original again while creating the new template.
After getting the inspiration put away the original. This way the own creativity is challenged
and it is not just an altering the original code.