Re-Designed: Kate

There is a rather bad habit that many theme creators have and that is putting a dark overlay on top of photos. There is a reasoning for that, of course - they want to ensure that the texts that get put on top of these images can be read. But, the result is usually a muddy disaster. In my estimation it would be wiser to trust the end user to choose their images wisely and pick those that have good copy space and let the images shine out in their full glory. So, the big job here was to clean up that rather gloomy overlay that the header image had in the original. And mindful of the needs of the end user I made two versions of this, one is configured for a dark header image and the other for a light header image,

When it came to typography I made a lot of changes here. I changed all the fonts to a favorite font of mine called Barlow which I used in both regular width and in a semi condensed width for paragraph texts. And I used a lot of light weights. and then, finally, I also made the layout about 100 pixels wider than the original which gives some needed breating room to the design.

Once all this was done, Kate emerged as a really beautiful 2 column blog, with a well structured sidebar and also a well coded 'Featured Post' widget that I could redesign to my liking (not many of these widgets allow much wiggle room for redesign, but this one did). And so, it also gets pride of place on top of the sidebar.

You can download my tweak of "Kate" here > > >

And the URL for the original template is here > > >

Important! 3rd party responsive Blogger themes have a lot of quirks that you will have to fix which come about every time that you restore a theme. So, this is not something that I can resolve with my tweak, there are some things that you, the end user, has to take care of before the theme is fully operational. To find out what these are and how to fix them, please make sure you look at the Instructions Page > > > right after you install the theme.