I like DePo Masthead theme by Derek Powazek very much.
The design is simple yet so well built, helped by Noel Jackson from Automattic
As his contribution is acknowledged by Derek Powazek himself, “Special thanks to the supremely talented Noel Jackson for turning my PSDs into reality”.
The DePo Masthead theme isn’t available for WordPress installs but you can have it from:
http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/depo-masthead/
this is how Derek Powazek describe his theme which has been liked by a lot of wordpress bloggers.
“The inspiration for this design came from classic magazines like Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. The main page features three posts (be sure to use the more tag to keep the excerpt short).
One thing I especially like about the design is that the comments on posts are hidden by default. This is to address a couple common blog design problems. First, moving the comments one click away takes away the spotlight a bit and should help decrease bozo comments. Second, I hate how, on a blog post with a lot of comments, you can’t glance at the browser’s scrollbar to see how much reading you’re in for. Some of the page is the author’s post (important) and some is commentary (less so).
My solution is to default the post to not show the comments. If the reader gets the the bottom of the post and wants commentary, it’s just one click away (and there’s no page refresh). The division between author and commentary is reinforced.
If you’ve got a WordPress.com blog, you can give it a spin with a single click (look in the 3-column designs). If you run a WP install on your site, stay tuned. I hope they’ll offer it up as a download.”
I’m using it since two days ago and I’m still playing with the “sidebars” … one really annoying thing to me is that categories & tags points the reader to the ALL WP.com content sporting it, instead of showing him more on the subject actually written by me …
Well, this is embarrassing, but how do I load this up to my wordpress.org site? Do I need to copy and paste each little piece in the theme editor…I know I should get on the web and look this up, but if you have a moment…
you need DePo Masthead for wordpress.org? get it here http://www.box.net/shared/e07b6i3pr8 it’s a zip file i downloaded file by file from svn
or you could just navigate to your themes directory via commandline and write svn co https://wpcom-themes.svn.automattic.com/depo-masthead/