Re-Designed: TrendMag

A very nice, functional grid theme that has the wonderful feature of being able to display both text only posts as well as image posts. On the original template there is an image behind the header and I wanted to keep that, just replace the image - but also, quite importantly - I wanted to make the header area higher and have the image go to the full browser width, so that it actually made some design sense to have an image there. However, when I tried to do this (and I did try with many different heights and widths) there was a spillover into the menu area. So, not being able to pull this off, I opted to give the header a solid dark color, which in the event, turned out to be a better design choice anyway.

I eliminated the salmon color from all the typographic elements. I have no idea why the original creators opt for these light pastel colors (I am seeing a lot of them), they are practically impossible to see unless you have the vision of a hawk. The fonts that the original creator had used were Lato and Montserrat. Lato, in my experince, is a font that works only in very light weights, as soon as you add some flesh onto the glyphs they start to manifest irregularities. Montserrat, does not have this problem - provided you stick to uppercase only! The lowercase of Montserrat has serious alignment issues both on the baseline and the x-height. So, I made a replacement with what I consider to be one of the top 3 sans serif fonts that you can find on Google Fonts, namely Barlow. I kept the sidebar only on the post page. The width of this one I only increased a tad, just enough to give things a bit more breating room.

You can download my tweak of "TrendMag" 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.