Blogger Guide, Blogger Template Designer

Blogger Template Designer is a new way for you to easily customize the look of your blog. You can select a variety of templates, images, colors, and column layouts to make your blog an expression of you. To get to the Template Designer, just click on the drop-down menu of the gray Post List icon, and select Template. From there, you'll be able to choose and customize your template.
As you play around with the Template Designer, you’ll see a preview of how the blog will appear based on the choices you’ve made, which you can expand to by pressing the toggle to Expand Preview between the Blogger Template Designer dashboard and the preview. When you’re satisfied with the look of your blog, you can make them go live by pressing Apply to Blog in the top right hand corner of the Template Designer.
To get started with Blogger Template Designer, select a template for your blog from one of the professionally designed templates that are available. Each template appears as a large thumbnail that when clicked will show different variations on the template below that you can select by clicking on them. Note that clicking a new template will erase any customizations you’ve made on a previous template.
Once you’ve chosen a template, you can continue customizing the look of your blog.
No matter what template you are previewing in Template Designer, you can always see what is currently live on your blog by looking at the Live on Blog thumbnail in the Template Designer control panel. You can also click on it to reset the template in the Template Designer to the live version of your blog.

Background

Even though you’ve chosen a template, you can still change the way that it looks. Using Blogger Template Designer, you can choose the background color or image for your blog and then play with the color scheme. To start customizing your background, click on the thumbnail under Background Image.
One of the best new features of Template Designer is the ability to change the color of your background image. This is possible when a background image has transparency. You can tell that a background image is transparent because it has a checkerboard in the top right hand corner of the image.
Once you’ve selected your image, you can change the color of the background by clicking on Main Color Theme and then selecting the color of your choice.
You can only change the color of your background if the background is transparent. Also, if the template that you chose has a grey background, you cannot change its color.
In addition to selecting and personalizing your blog’s background image, you can also choose a color theme to apply to aspects of your blog, including text and links. You can do this by playing with the Main Color Theme or by choosing one of our Suggested Themes. Changing the color theme of your blog will change the colors for all aspects of the blog template that can be changed.
Note: If background image is not transparent, themes will alter the text color scheme of the blog

For information on uploading your own custom background image, please see our article on adding custom CSS to your blog.

Layout

You can choose a variety of layout options for your blog, from one to three columns. These layouts feature drag and drop functionality for gadgets. You will also have a variety of layout options for the blog footer as well.
If you want to add or remove gadgets or edit gadget settings, you cannot do this through Blogger Template Designer. Rather, you have to do this on the general Layout tab.

Adjust Width

You can change the width of the blog, and the right and left columns by dragging the slider for the different parts of blog layout. Note that the options you see here correspond to the type of layout that you chose. If, for example, you chose a blog with left and right columns, you will see both left and right column sliders. If, however, you chose a blog with only a left column, you will only see that option here.