Hi all,
Thank you for your helpful design input. As you can see, the new design went live, grats!
If you see any CSS/Styling issues, please start a new question for the bug report, and tag it with "Design" and "Bug." It will be a lot easier for me to track new questions than reading the comments replied to this thread.
The favicons may be cached by your browsers, to see the new ones, load the following URL in your browser's address bar and hard refresh.
http://sstatic.net/tex/img/favicon.ico
http://sstatic.net/texmeta/img/favicon.ico
Regarding the header background montage, I have used some of your suggestions. I'm still keeping it very subtle, since it's used for pure decorative purpose only. The content of the background image isn't final, I'm always up for suggestions.
Designing this site has been an educational experience for me. I've learned quite a bit about what TeX can do! Thank you for such a wonderful community and congratulations on the launch.
BTW: I'll be hanging around the TeX chat room you can catch me there for design discussions.