Re-Designed: Mini

Mini Tweaked Home Page	Mini Tweaked Post Page
Mini Original Home Page	Mini Original Post Page

The first thing that needed to be tackled with Mini was to clean up the visual material, which meant eliminating the grey overlays that the original creator had placed on pretty much everything from homepage thumbnails to post header images. This is of course something that is done very often in order to make the titles and texts legible. But, it is a really bad approach given that there are other things that you can do to achieve the same result, such as adding shadows to the texts that will provide legibility even if the image that is behind them is in a tone that is very close to the color of the text. And, in the screenshots above you can see this quite clearly: Even though I am using a very light weighted font which is rendered in white on very light toned images, both on the homepage and the post page, you can still read everything quite clearly, thanks to the small shadow that is placed behind the text.

The rest was pretty straightforward: I changed the font from Open Sans to Barlow which is a much better choice for a sans serif family and then replaced the original bold weights of the texts with lighter ones. THe layout width did not change, I kept the original. There were a lot advertisement slots on this theme, these are still in place except that I disabled them. But, if needed, they can be reactivated from inside the HTML code. I added a random posts widget which I have been using quite a bit lately. It is a code that I found, obviously, but I have customized it to look quite different from what I originally found. So, now that we have clean bright images, Mini would be a very good choice for a portfolio site.

You can download my tweak of "Mini" 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.