New Name, New Design

My old blog design was, well, old! Its smaller width reflected the limitations of monitor widths in olden times, color looked like an old fungal infected scroll(which, BTW, was the background image), and it was written before template designer was introduced in blogger(yes, that old).

I actually wanted to change that one with my own design for past 3 years, but that never happened in part due to my perfectionism and in part laziness. Google changed the design system two times in the meanwhile. ;-)

Initially(two years ago I guess) I started converting Andreas Viklund's one of the templates into a Blogger theme. I had a liking for his designs since the days of my very first blog which used one of his themes modified for blogger by Aswin(I basically just copied it off of his blog, Neosagredo, which does not exist any more.)

I never got around doing it and at one point forgot that job altogether due to other commitments and Google also changed their theme system. Then, this January I found that there was a serious grammatical error in the blog's caption itself. :( I decided that I should get rid of the theme itself for good or move the blog to Wordpress. WP has nice editor(in fact I authored this post in WP and then copied it to Blogger;-) that obeyed semantic HTML4/5 standards, had HTML5 themes, math support etc. I didn't go to WP since they didn't allow custom design and domain for basic account.

I started modifying the 'Simple' default theme that came with the new Blogger Designer Template. The reasons for choosing it are twofold. One, I like to have clean themes with no fuss and improved readability. Two, it is easy to modify a plain bare bones wire-frame to your liking rather than a heavy theme. :)

If your browser doesn't support these typography features (older browsers or insane ones like IE), the theme will look bland though still readable. :-) Also it makes use of CSS3 features like box shadows for boxes like this one and image frames.

This theme relies heavily on typography (webfonts, kerning, letter-spacing etc.) rather than on pictures and such, so that it is more readable and takes less time to load. The fonts used are IM Fell English SC for header, Philosopher for all headings and Inconsolata for all other text.

Hope this design is good. Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. :-)