Simplicity and easy navigation for the new tickerTXT site narrowed the focus to 1-column designs (at least for header and main content. The default templates of blogger offer all 2-column designs.
The team's favourite for a visually stunning and yet simple design has quickly become the photo blog of
Mike Matas. The concrete-look of the background helps the pictures to stand out. The colours of the photos are enhanced by the simple white frame which look like an old-style photobook, even more when Mike plays with photos of a
vintage plane, which seem like 1940s originals. Not to forget his beautiful and intriguing photos, which appear unnaturally sharp and colourful, yet they don't seem overly re-worked. Just take a few moments and enjoy his site.
One free blogger template seemed to blend both single column design and a concrete look:
Falling Dreams. As so often it is a wordpress them (by
Razvan Teodorescu) which has been converted to blogger (by by Naeem Noor) . But in order to be used for tickerTXT, it would have needed quite a bit of tweaking. Then we remembered Nexus5 by Amanda Fazani of BloggerBuster.com.
Nexus5 is beautiful in it's simplicity and ultra-"tweakable". Amanda really has pulled quite a few stops. The menu bar offers a nice way to be useful not just to CSS and HTML people. The menu bar is integrated with the "Link-List" blogger gadget. Great idea, nice execution.
So Nexus 5 is the basis, and the team wanted the looks to be inspired by Mike Matas' blog. Let the tweaking begin.