A few days ago I got thinking that I’ve been using CSS frameworks such as Blueprint quite a lot and that they carry some bloat that makes them less than ideal for smaller projects. It didn’t take long until I was creating a new theme, one that was clean and as bloat-free as possible. That theme is Clean theme.

In a couple of sessions I managed to create what I feel is a good solid foundation for building a small Drupal site.

Key features of the Clean theme:

• Lean, mean base theme
• Fully XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1 valid
• 3 column collapsible layout
• Fancy blog and comment submission dates
• Large base font size
• Relative font sizes
• Thorough use of CSS inheritance

I wanted to keep this theme as simple as possible so here’s a brief rundown of design decisions that were made to facilitate this:

• Fixed width, pixel based layout
• Minimal reset using * { margin:0; padding:0; }
• Minimal form styling (mostly tidying up)

Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, this theme is more of a base theme. Having said that it’s got enough default styles to make it usable right out of the box.

Update: I'm not trying to say that the Drupal Blueprint theme is bloated. It's still an awesome theme and we're going to continue using it for major projects where 100% accuracy is required.