Introducing "Scribe" from Blogger

After numerous weeks of sitting, waiting, and wondering if this would ever see the light of day, Google has relaunched Blogger.

The news is a big deal on numerous fronts -- one, for anyone who currently uses Blogger to publish their web site; two, for anyone who's considered starting a web site but didn't where to look; and three, for the "blog" community as a whole, for with the marketing, technological, and financial muscle of Google pulling the strings, Blogger (and blogging in general) is about to go to a whole new level.

Now, that's all fine and good, but for me the best part is purely personal for I was involved (albeit in a small, gazing from the hillside kind of way) in the relaunch by creating one of the new default templates Blogger users can choose from. I call it Scribe.

My involvement in the project came through Douglas Bowman of Stop Design, who was contracted by Google to work on various parts of the relaunch (which he talks more about here). Myself, along with Jeffrey Zeldman, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, and Dan Rubin, were each asked to design and code one CSS / XHTML template, including a home page and a story page, using Blogger's API as our skeleton to skin.

For me the most exciting part wasn't just the aforementioned company I would be working with, but the opportunity to create a template design thousands of people would potentially use. After all, the old Blogger templates were a very successful foundation for untold numbers of web sites; and while they may not have been the most visually arresting, or contain the most streamlined code, they succeeded at one important goal -- they visually got out of the way and allowed users' content to drive the personality of their site.

So the creative challenge, for me anyhow, was to develop a template design that had personality and a general creative concept, but (like the old Blogger templates) wasn't so visually overbearing that it distracted readers from the real content of the page.

The design had to be interesting, yet restrained. Have style, yet be appreciable by varying users' tastes. Be functional, but not boring. And...oh yeah, the template had to styled almost entirely with CSS, with graphics used only when absolutely necessary.

So I tried to think of objects or products with near universal appeal, since the design would be used by people with wildly varying taste. Books and journals came to mind (everybody reads, right?), so I aimed for a color palette, layout, and typography that had the tactile feel of a printed work, hoping to create a space that felt warm and slightly nostalgic. After a number of iterations, the end result was Scribe.

The concept could have been pushed much farther, with more book-ish graphical effects like page corner curls, frayed edges, and other applicable stuff (and chances are, if I was creating this template for my own site, or for a client, I would have done just that), but it would have drawn greater attention to the visual design, and the author would have been in competition with the template for users' attention.

So I went with the basics -- a light parchment paper texture (aged edges and all), a deep brown border to give the page "lift" (like a book's hardcover as seen from inside the book), and warm brown / black tones in the typography. I also created an ever-popular bitmap tiled wallpaper, to emulate the patterns often seen on the inside of old hardcover books.

In the end, I'm pretty pleased with the result. But to critique myself, I believe Scribe's appeal can change depending on monitor gamma and color correctness. On most screens it looks balanced with a pleasant level of contrast, while on others it can appear a little muddy. But that's the nature of using a non web-safe, limited color palette with a delicate visual balance. I don't expect the template to be the most popular (most users will likely choose one of the more neutral options), but for those who appreciate this style, I hope Scribe fits the bill.