Newsprint: A Contrib Theme?

For some reason, I've been wanting a challenge lately. Particularly, I've been wanting to create a web design for a site that was seriously heavy on content, like a newspaper, but with a very specific style. Unfortunately, none of our current client's sites are that particularly heavy on content and none of them come close to fitting into the style I wanted to explore.

Born is the beginning of what might become a contributed theme. Maybe. Considering how much work building this is going to be, and considering "these tough economic times" it's really hard for me to completely abolish the idea of putting this bad boy up on theme forest or something. I also want to be generous, though. We'll see how I feel when the build is complete.

Newsprint Full Comp

Now... where do I start? I have tons of experience creating custom themes for clients when I know exactly what their content is and how it is going to be displayed... I have no clue how to make a more generalized theme that can be used with any combination of content types or themes. Also, what do I do about things like sIFR and Imagecache, which this theme will obviously depend on?

Anyone out there with experience creating themes for general use, I would really appreciate your advice or links to webpage with tips and hints, etc.