Teaching Bloggers To Fish

We take design incredibly seriously at Six Apart -- the challenge of understanding constraints and working within them to make something beautiful, the thrill of seeing a final product that "just works", and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that you chose substance over flash and it worked out for the best. Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox provide hundreds of themes and styles ranging from something professional to something intricately elaborate, with many customizable choices in between. We do this to give you freedom of expression and complete control over your blog.

All of that is in the back of our heads when we think about how our tools can advance the state of design on the web. Forgive the cliché, but we don't want to just give people a fish, we want to teach them how to fish. It's easy to make tools to create a design, but it's far harder to create tools that help you get in the mindset of making good tradeoffs.

So today we bring you the Design Assistant for Movable Type. Sure, you can click through it and knock out a cool custom design really quickly. But along the way, you'll start to see how a few common grid/column layouts can impact the way your content is perceived. The Assistant creates finished designs, but you're also encouraged to click on individual page elements and understand the CSS cascade that informs their styling. The last step isn't merely when a particular design is applied to your blog -- the last step is actually the start of learning more, from a broad selection of hand-picked learning resources.

It's similar, in a lot of ways, to the thought 37signals puts into the so-called "blank slate" state for their applications. When you start out using their services and haven't yet entered any data, the tools provide illustrations of what they'll look like in actual use which get you in the right mindset. We know there's an opportunity to get people who are just thinking "I need to pick a theme" to think in the mindset of a designer.

Movable Type was the first blogging platform to popularize CSS-based designs and are proud to count many of the world's most talented and influential designers as members of our community. But we're just as interested in getting people who've never consciously thought about web design to make a first step towards appreciating one of the greatest things blogs have brought to the web: An appreciation for design.

Alright, designers: What should we add to the Assistant? We're going to be evolving the tool rapidly based on your feedback, bringing these capabilities to TypePad members and adding a wide range of new functionality. Your input is going to help us choose where we go next. You can also read more about it on MovableType.org.