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_CSS uses an elastic, source-ordered, 3-column CSS layout, which unfortunately has problems on browsers with impaired CSS implementations (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6). It's focus on these browsers is to remain readable, though not necessarily functional. You may want to look at Sands, which uses tables for layout if browser compatibility is a top priority.
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.
- Uses a 3-column, fluid/elastic, source-ordered CSS layout
