In case you haven't heard, 
SteemPress is an open source project providing a simple, customizable, self-hostable blog engine powered by the steem blockchain. The goals of the projects are as follows: create a blog platform that anyone can host on any web host.
This is my entry for the competition: http://pon.nyc/steempress/theme-default/
Some of my considerations while designing and building the theme:
This is an open source project so I wanted to use web safe universal fonts that look beautiful and everyone can access. I've paired a Georgia font stack as the serif and Helvetica based stack as the sans-serif. This also keeps the theme nice and performant for everyone, since no additional fonts need to be loaded.
I've used an energetic bright pink for hover states on dynamic elements. Ideally, this would be a configurable component so people can choose whatever color they want.
To avoid user confusion, I believe that the core icons and interactions shared between Steemit and SteemPress should be as consistent as possible between the platforms. So, I've used icons from the Steemit platform, and propose that the interaction behavior is retained from Steemit.
The website is powered by Steempress and Steem. I placed the content of the blog above a fixed position footer. This gives the page depth and reinforces the metaphor that the underlying architecture of this blog platform is SteemPress and Steem.
To represent the dynamic nature of the Steemit community, I created an animation that makes it look like steam is rising through the logo.
By checking out the live HTML & CSS theme here:
http://pon.nyc/steempress/theme-default/
Note: All photographs were taken from Unsplash which has a Creative Commons Zero license for all its photos.
