Sands is an attempt to create an all-purpose, drop-in replacement, "generic" theme like Bluemarine. It has design attributes taken from Drupal.org's proprietary Bluebeach theme and friendselectric.
Sands uses tables for layout to maximize browser compatibility. If you want an elastic, source-ordered, 3 column CSS layout, take a look at Sands_CSS.
Some features:
- Higher contrast colors, underlined links, and relative font sizes
- Novel styling of node information, comments, and block menus
- Semantic XHTML, heavy use of CSS
- Segregation of style information, including an easily-modifiable colors.css containing all color and background image definitions
- Designed in mind to be easily modifiable to create your own custom themes
- Uses many subtle gradiented background images to create a "smooth," more high-contrast look
- Uses Mark James' Silk CMS Icons for emphasis on selected links
- Uses the PHPTemplate theme engine.