A Better Blogger

The big news today is the rebirth of Blogger — not only a new version of the application, with tons of new features, but also an undeniably friendly, pleasing and rock-solid redesign of Blogger.com by Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path.
Be sure to read Doug’s informative write-up on the entire project over at Stopdesign.
In a very small way, I was fortunate to have taken part in the project, by designing a template that can be selected by the thousands of the Blogger users.
TicTac (also available in blue flavor) was my contribution to an all-star cast of web designers who, collectively created over 20 free templates. The design was inspired by a pattern that I see each and every day — on my shower curtain, and coincidentally, works well with the new “rounded” theme of the new Blogger.
Extra care was taken to ensure the design would be flexible enough for any amount of content at any text size. For example, the header uses a vertical version of the Sliding Doors technique (sliding windows?), where if the Blogger user has a long site title, or if the user bumps up the text size, the header graphic (separated into two pieces) willl “spread apart” to accomodate it.
It was fun adding to the relaunch in a tiny way — and just think, Blogger users can also choose their site to be designed by Jeffrey Zeldman, Dave Shea, Todd Dominey, Dan Rubin — and not to mention Douglas Bowman himself. All standards-compliant, 100% CSS — and free. Very cool!
So, hats off to Doug, Adaptive Path and the Blogger team for pulling together a great relaunch. And with Google behind it, there’s no telling how many new users will be turned on by the value of weblogs.