So, amazingly, after giving you guys this speech about how I wanted to conduct a transparent design process, I squirrel myself away, whipping up visual iterations, changing them, showing them to a few close friends, and making changes. that's exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Still, my current design thoughts have problems, and I guess it's artistic ego that doesn't want to let me show it while those problems are unsolved. Nevertheless, discussion might help solve those problems, so here goes.

The 'current' mock is Fury 4.0d5. Caveats:

• The parts that I focused on here were the masthead, the first entry on the page, and the 'on this page' nav box.
• The rest of the nav boxes haven't been touched yet, though they absolutely will, and several will be going away, and new ones replacing them.
• The HTML and CSS code are very messy. Don't worry about that. This is a design mock and the code will be optimized when I write it into the live system. CSS folk might notice that the 'on this page' nav box is all css, reducing a fair bit of table junk.
• I haven't personally tested this on any browsers other than Safari.
• The 'comments' summary after the first post is still a work in progress. I still need to put in links to the actual posts, see how it looks when there are 25 comments, and not just 2, have a clear link for adding a comment, etc.
• I removed the 'comment dots' from the timeline. They made the design even busier, and their usefulness is diminished by the 'on this page' box.
• The timeline bar items will actually be colored the same as the 'on this page' items, in a gradient (like topics is) instead of the 'new, 1day, 3 day, old' system. (Thoughts on this?)

Okay, now the known issues:

1. The color scheme is either too sterile or too patriotic.
2. The page seems too crowded. (This should be improved when the rest of the nav boxes are done)
3. I'm not sure that I'm happy with the presentation of the # and newness of comments in the 'on this page' box.
4. More I can't think of just now.

Okay, I again stress work in progress, but have at it anyhow.

For comparison and conversational fodder, check out a few earlier versions: 4.0d1, 4.0d2, 4.0d3, 4.0d4.