Announcing the Design Assistant

You've told us loud and clear you want even more, even better design options, and in recent weeks we've been concentrating on bringing you what you asked for by adding new themes and functionality to help you make your blog beautiful. 

We've passed a milestone in our design offering recently.  Here it is, short and sweet:

100 themes, over 1000 professional designs, and an infinite number of customization possibilties.

With last week's launch of five variations each for three all-new professionally-designed themes, TypePad became the first hosted blogging service to offer over 100 design options built right in. And as always, every single theme on TypePad works right out of the box with every widget, every TypeList, and every feature on TypePad.

But we're still adding features.  Today we're introducing the Design Assistant to TypePad.  The Design Assistant made its debut for Movable Type a few weeks ago, eliciting responses like "This is amazing!", "Very cool!", "Fantastic! This is something many didn't even dream of". This new Assistant comes with all the features and functionality that wowed the MT audience, but it's custom-tailored to work with the 100+ unique themes built into TypePad.

The Design Assistant will walk you through the process of choosing from all of TypePad's themes and layouts - as well as custom CSS – in order to assist you in visualizing your blog’s look and feel.  Plus, for the very first time you can see all of TypePad's themes, at a glance, whether you're logged in as a member or not.  Just go to the Design Assistant and click on the Select A Theme tab.

Once you've chosen a theme, you can preview what it would look like in each of the layouts that are currently available.  You can also test drive how some custom CSS will alter your design's look before the final step, which instructs you how to apply the look you just created to your blog.

Of course, we're not stopping here.  We have a few more design fixes and features up our sleeves, and we're working to add some specific features you've asked for, including an easy way to add horizontal navigation to your blog that works with TypePad pages, and additional templates to choose from.  Look for those in the coming months.

As we promised at the start of the year, 2008 is set to be TypePad's best year ever. Many of the best bloggers in the world make their home on TypePad, and with today's design milestone, we're proud to point out that many of the most beautiful blogs in the world are powered by TypePad, too. In the comments, let us know if you give the Design Assistant a spin, or link us to the customized design you're proud to have built with TypePad.

Comments

[Martyn Drake]

This is wonderful. The only thing that it needs is a little pop-up box at each element so that colours, fonts and the like can be changed so that us completely and utterly useless CSS idiots can produce the code even easier. In other words, if you could combine the "Create your own Design" with the "Design Assistant", you've got yourselves a winner.

[Hans-Joerg (ME)]

I love to have this as an option for picking my designs. It was difficult to choose between the existing themes beforehand, and many of them were unnoticed by me because the preview was too small.

Custom-CSS editor could support us a little more
by showing some standard attributes (color, bgcolor, font and such) but this already is much better than custom-css editing as it was before.

Love it :-)

[M & Co - Around the house]

This is great news! I'm hoping you'll add a tool to easily add background images to our design? Thats what I miss the most.

[davidinnv]

With all the wonderful new design elements that have been added, I hope the need to address some of the nuts-and-bolts issues of creating and posting content is not being forgotten.

Where I'm hoping for improvements, in particular, is in the process for adding comments to a post. Comment authors, especially the blog owner, ought to be able to have the capability for many of the features available when posting original messages, such as spell-check and a choice between html and plain text. Also, the ability to add a graphic to a comment.

I hope things like this are being looked at.

[sbpoet]

People tell me my Watermark blog is beautiful -- simple though it is. I look forward to playing with this new tool -- and I hope it will work for folks like me, who want to start with a blank slate.

I love TypePad, and am very pleased with the new energy and features.

[Account Deleted]

I'd really like to be able to pick a template I like & add my own custom picture for the header. (There might be a way to do this now but I'm not sure how...)

[Cathy Stevens]

I'll be very happy when the posting options have a feature to center text and images. I know this has nothing to do with the design of the blog, but it is a feature that continually perplexes me as to why it is not a feature.

[jvhomes]

Maybe it's just me but the design assistant does not seem to work when it comes to "previewing" more css options.

[davidinnv]

If I had to pick the one TypePad improvement I would like to see, above all others, it would be a relatively simple one: the capability of doing spell-check on the comments I post in response to those of my readers. I know it's a boring, nuts-and-bolts type of thing, but it would be so appreciated!

[UIGuy]

I would really love to give a standing ovation for the great job that they did in the design. As a fellow designer, I had to post a play by play detail of 9 points I loved about the design and 1 point of suggestion: http://www.immotion.net/blog/post/TypePad-Design-Assistant.aspx. Great job!

[susy*]

i'm trying to check this out, but when i try and sign up for the trial, it brings me to an untitled page.

how do i use this for the blog i currently have?

http://www.susanconnordesign.typepad.com/heysusy

thanks...this looks cool, but it would be great if it was better integrated for people that have been on typepad for a while!