Articles Are People, Too
This is Bagatelle, my second submission to OSWD. It's similar in layout to cityslicker, my first submission, but has a major difference: it's made for articles rather than blogs. The two-column layout is perfect for larger amounts of text, and the cross-column pullouts are good for drawing attention to certain quotes or images (charts, for example). Besides the cross-column pullouts (which took a bit of black magic, let me tell you!), I did another subtle experimental thing in this design: The faux-soft shadows in the header text. Yep, that's all CSS and text. It won't look like that in Opera, but it won't look too far off.
It Works in IE, I Promise!
As in my first design, you will probably want to remove the XML prologue I fixed this problem by using a <meta> tag to specify the encoding, instead of the XML prologue. It interferes with Internet Explorer's ability to sense the DOCTYPE element, and causes the browser to revert to quirks mode, wrecking the box model. In case you're wondering what's causing the OSWD preview to look incorrect in IE, there you have it. If you want to see a preview of what the page looks like in IE without that blasted prologue, click here. Unfortunately, the prologue is required for OSWD submission, because its absence causes a warning (not an error) in W3C validation.
Adopt, Adapt, and Improve
I hope you enjoy using this design. Unlike many who submit designs here, I'm a firm believer in the greatness of Open Source and its sense of community. That means, you are free, nay, encouraged to change this design in any way you see fit. I would love for you to submit your improvements back to OSWD, but if you do, please include link in the template body back to this original OSWD preview. This way we can keep a trail of versions, which is a good thing. Also, it will keep people from thinking you're passing it off as your own original design, which is frowned upon.