After a long long time, I ended up developing a blogger template for my friend Surya Prakash.
He has an excellent blog going, with some profound posts. So I decided to give his blog a much needed rehaul. After all, what are friends for?
PS: It is interesting that “Surya Prakash” means “Sun Light”, and his blog has a light reference. Me thinks it is deliberate.
Inspiration:
The blog title “Random Flickers of Light”. Obviously ‘Light flicker’ spoke out to me, design wise.
Approach:
I tried out some light flares on a dark background using GIMP. Surya’s earlier template was light text on dark blue [Minima by Douglas Bowman]. I then toyed with dark header band followed by a light bottom, quite like a split Hemingway.
That didnt look good either. So I deliberately went for a dark on light approach. I decided to give Surya the blue he likes so much, but in a lighter warmer teal. I then went opposite and added a warm brown. I now had the 2 extreme points of the pallette.
Layout:
Surya didnt have too much action going in his blog. So in accordance with his clean approach, I decided to go for a two coloumn layout, and keep the focus on the content instead of the sidebar.
Features:
Surya didnt have a feedburner account or a feed link in his earlier blog. So I went google hopping for a “3d RSS Icon” and stumbled upon a white background coffeecup feed icon. I matched the background to the blog background using GIMP, and set up a feedburner account as well.
Design elements:
There is only one design element that is repeated in varying sizes, and that is the light flare in the header and a smaller one in the post meta found at the bottom of the page.
I had fun styling the blog motto in varying shades of brown,cinnamon and teal. [Top right, aka top of the sidebar]
Faulty Estimates/Learning from the experience:
Most templates for blogger are XML based and widget ready [Something a very T-Rex me failed to anticipate.]
So when I sent the HTML file to Surya, he had trouble handling the “bad XML” warning he got. So after granting me access, I quickly fixed this one by reverting to a classic style and sticking the html template for now.
Note to self: Learn XML well, and figure out the secret blogger variables and what they stand for..