tickerTXT site re-design: the search of inspiration

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.