Questions on design in Typepad...for which Typepad help is no help.

February 6, 2008 1:29 PM

Aesthete in need of assistance with tweaking the design of Typepad blog. Subtle drop shadows with CSS and more...

A little background:

I have retooled the design of a blog I currently have on Typepad (3 columns, total width 800 pixels) using iWeb to play around with subtle shadows, fonts, and spacing for visualization purposes.

I currently have a Plus account on Typepad. With this reworking of the design, all I want to do is:

a. edit the colors of the columns
b. improve the banner image
c. add very subtle drop shadows to the columns (think MocoLoco)
d. experiment with 1.3x line spacing for the text of posts

I know how to translate a. and b. to my blog on Typepad, but c. and d. are causing some confusion.

I'm pretty sure I'll have to upgrade to a Pro account to be able to use CSS for the drop shadows, if that's indeed how I will have to do them. (I've heard that the simplest way to do this is by using shadow "images" and placing them with CSS, but does this work when a shadow goes over top of an edge of a column?)

As for the line spacing in posts, is this something I can do, and how?

Thanks SO much!

posted by pearl228 to computers & internet (3 comments total)

p
{
line-height: 1.3
}

The method for doing the drop shadows depends greatly on the specifics of your design.
posted by designbot at 2:33 PM on February 6

One way to add drop shadows on both sides and the top of a column would be to just use a single image for the top and another image repeating along the y axis of the column for the rest. I'm not a web designer, so expect a better answer from one soon.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 3:28 PM on February 6

Hey, pearl228!

I actually work in TypePad support, and we just happened to catch your post today. I dropped you a MeFi-Mail about this with some specific details about our CSS structure and some ideas for what you can do to make your drop shadows, but you might want to go ahead and open a help ticket (log in to TypePad, then go to Control Panel > Help > New Ticket) with us so that we can help you out with the other issues that you've mentioned.

You can actually edit the colors of your columns and upload a custom banner with your Plus account if you switch to a Custom Theme, but the line spacing and drop shadows would need to be done with Custom CSS, which is something reserved for the Pro accounts.

Hope this helps :-)
posted by mewithoutyou at 9:15 PM on February 7 [1 favorite]