Blog this! In 2002, as part of its sale to Google, Pyra Lab­ss then incred­i­bly pop­u­lar Blog­ger plat­form rein­vent­ed itself. The new ver­sion was more com­pet­i­tive with Mov­able Type and oth­er high-end blog­ging pack­ages on the fea­tures lev­el, while striv­ing to be eas­i­er for novices to use than any oth­er web pub­lish­ing software.

Standards-based design for non-designers

New in this ver­sion were good-look­ing, stan­dards-com­pli­ant (XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS lay­out) tem­plates cre­at­ed by some famil­iar names from the world of stan­dards-based design. Plug, play, and go.

Struc­tured in XHTML 1.0 Strict and laid out in CSS, the new tem­plates not only gave Blog­ger users an appeal­ing range of instant site designs, they also ensured that every Blog­ger users site would be stan­dards-com­pli­ant and for­ward-com­pat­i­ble. Our role: design­ing three of those shiny new user templates.

• Mr Moto
• Ms Moto
• Son of Moto

The cre­ative chal­lenge was to come up with a dis­tinc­tive look and feel that was not dri­ven by brand attrib­ut­es. This is hard­er than it sounds. Mean­ing­ful design springs from the soil of the brand. You design one way for a fun, easy brand, and quite anoth­er way for a brand that wish­es to posi­tion itself as cut­ting-edge, for exam­ple. But the Blog­ger tem­plates had to be flex­i­ble enough to appeal to almost any writer, writ­ing in almost any style, on almost any topic.

Taking blogging and web standards mainstream

Our suc­cess, with that of our part­ners, took blog­ging main­stream and added lit­er­al­ly mil­lions of stan­dards-com­pli­ant sites to the web. Bot­tom line: Your Aunt Mau­reen, your uncle George, and your cousin who is afraid of the com­put­er­pret­ty much any­body­could now have a pro­fes­sion­al­ly designed weblog built with seman­tic markup and tor­ture-test­ed style sheets.

Be kind when you view the tem­plates: 2002 was cen­turies ago in web design his­to­ry, and stan­dards com­pli­ance in browsers was still evolv­ing, lim­it­ing what could be done.

As this was a Google gig, many con­sul­tants and design­ers con­tributed. Adap­tive Path con­sult­ed on ease of use and site flow. Doug Bow­man of Stopde­sign redesigned the Blogger.com site and led the cre­ation of user tem­plates by a team of design all-stars. In addi­tion to his own designs and ours, Doug secured the ser­vices of Dan Ceder­holm (Sim­plebits), Todd Dominey, Dan Rubin, and Dave Shea (CSS Zen Garden).

Our responsibilities on this project

Design and code.