Blogger theme

Blogger is the theme in this catalogue with the least in it, which was the whole intention. It is aimed at writers, freelancers and one-person portfolios: a reading column, generous line height, a small amount of navigation, and no visual furniture competing with the text. Twelve block regions are available, but the default configuration uses very few of them.

It is fully responsive and was tested on iPhone and iPad specifically, which by mid-2014 was the realistic minimum. Like the other themes from that year it uses FlexSlider for a captioned front-page slideshow and expects jQuery Update configured to 1.8, because Drupal 7 core's bundled jQuery was too old to run it.

One release, in June 2014, and then nothing — it shipped in the same month as Venture, right at the point where my attention moved to application work. Around 220 sites still report running it. For a theme with a single release and no follow-up that is a decent showing, and it is mostly explained by the brief: a minimal writing theme has very little that can go wrong, so there was very little to fix.

The design argument it makes is one I still believe. On a content site the typography is not decoration applied to the product — it is the product, and every element you add around it is competing with the thing the visitor came for.