I will mention some thoughts. 1. 12.24% of one of my sites is 800x600. Some of that traffic is from people who have old equipment and can't afford new and other is from large monitors and bad eyesight. There are still sites out there using modified versions or unmodified versions of Blue Marine. 2. I certainly hope we are not considering 'AD' space for the default Drupal theme. I really don't want to look at an ad out of the box with the default base theme. Or look at the big message that says PLACE AD BLOCK HERE 3. The blue color is fine, just to big and dominating. Perhaps a fade gradient ala Chameleon and tighten it up a bit. Something to make it dominate the content less. Putting secondary links is fine but does it go away when there is no search bar/secondary links? Secondary links to me are not needing to be huge and overpowering... They are meant to be secondary, or context sensitive 4. If rounded corners add DIV's then it should not be done. Not because of Morbus' reason of markup (which are perfectly fine reasons), etc, but from a practicality standpoint of keeping it simple for those learning how to use Drupal theme's and for those maintaining it in core. 5. Using JavaScript to round corners has the added benefit of providing an example of using JQuery in a core theme. Sides, Steven's comment about 'all the pastelly rounded corners and soft shadows' when he did his redesign kind of interesting. Just my thoughts. -sepeck