As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the sheer quality of Blogger templates has increased dramatically this past year or so. Now that talented designers and coders have begun to understand the widespread appeal of Blogger, we are presented with wonderful, intricate and highly usable Blogger templates to enhance the overall appearance of our blogs and dazzle our growing readerships.
In this post, I’d like to introduce you to ten stunningly beautiful templates for Blogger, which are all free to download and are highly functional to boot.
1. Art Template
Converted for Blogger by Gosu of FoolBlogger.com, this stunning design is reminiscent of a scrapbook compilation with customized headings for the widgets in the sidebar, an integrated search function and even colourful tabs for your important blog pages.
This was converted from the original WordPress template by EzWpThemes.
View demo of Blogger Art Template | Read more and download this free Blogger template
2. Water Color
Converted from the WordPress theme by TemplateLite, Falcon Hive’s theme offering is based on a watercolor design and includes a useful Flickr Photostream in the footer. Dates for each post are neatly presented as tabs to the left of each post, while the single sidebar offers room for all your Blogger gadgets.
View demo of Water Color Blogger template | Read more and download this free Blogger theme
3. Magazeen
Magazeen is a truly amazing conversion from the free WordPress theme designed for Smashing Magazine. Zona Cerebral’s conversion is truly excellent.
While this template may not include such stunning backgrounds and design features as other templates in this article, the use of block color and particularly the featured posts in the sidebar make this an eye-catching design with user-friendly properties. Just below the header you can see the integrated Flickr photostream while comments for each post are highlighted in contrasting bold pink.
View demo of Magazeen for Blogger | Lean more about Magazeen for Blogger and download this free theme
4. Black Magic
This rich, dark template is another conversion of a Smashing Magazine template. Originally designed by Gopal Raju, this theme offers a two column layout which is especialy useful for portfolios and was converted for use with Blogger by IpieToon.
View demo of Black Magic for Blogger | Read more and download this free Blogger theme
5. Zinmag Tribune
Zinmag Tribune is an elaborate and elegant conversion of the newspaper-style theme by Jinsona Design. Almost every aspect of the original functionality has been maintained in this conversion which must have proved difficult work for Falcon Hive to convert, yet results in an amazing theme which you really need to view for yourself to appreciate.
View demo of Zinmag Tribune | Read more and download this free Blogger theme
6. Infinity for Blogger
If you had seen this template on Smashing Magazine when it was first released, you’d probably have wondered when a talented Blogger designer would have converted it for use with Blogspot blogs!
Well here it is, this stunning dark yet colourful design which was first created by Vikiworks Studio has been converted by Blogger FAQs with very little loss in usability.
The sidebar is fully widgetized, and images on the front page operate as stunning links to individual post pages. Links in the header section can be configured to point to important blog posts, while the RSS feed in the upper right points to your blog’s usual feed URL.
View demo of Infinity for Blogger | Read more and download
7. Craftwork
Here is another truly stunning template in the scrapbook style. Originally designed by WP Themes, this template has been converted for Blogger users by Blogger FAQs, and would be especially useful for those writing about craft or feminine issues.
View demo of Craftworks template | Read more and download this free theme
8. Dark Forest
Dark Forest is an original and ethereal design by Ray Creations. Offering a two column layout and stunning background image, this is a beautiful and eye-catching design which would be highly effective for creative bloggers and photographers.
View demo of Dark Forest | Download this template
9. Vintage Paper
This is quite a simple template, but one which is made beautiful by a stunning background design and attention to detail. Originally designed by Ophelia Nicholson, this theme would be ideal for a writer or to showcase photography against the aged-paper background.
View demo of Vintage paper | Read more and download this free theme
10. Notebook
This beautiful Blogger template is another original design by RayCreations. Offering a pale, intricate background image and grunge-inspired design, this template would be ideally suited for creative bloggers to showcase their own designs through blog posts.
View demo | Download this beautiful Blogger theme
Final thoughts
My intention for this article was to supply a list of ten stunning templates which have captured my interest n recent weeks. There are literally hundreds of free Blogger templates available for download, and my selection represents but a fraction of the best Blogger designs available. So if there are particular themes which you enjoy and would like to recommend to other members of the Blogger community, please feel free to detail these in the comments below.
Stunning indeed! Thanks so much for sharing.
Thanks for the resource, Amanda. I have been looking for a new template to refresh the look of my blog.
Amanda,
I have a quick question about a previous post. Unfortunately, since the post was over 30 days old, I was unable to post a comment there.
Your Picasa Photostream is EXACTLY what I have been looking for. However, when I use the code, it seems to start looking at picture at June 2008 and later. I tried to look at the JS but I could not decode it. Any help here?
Thanks in advance,
Jordan Irazabal
Enjoyed this post very much, thanks for feature our Blogger templates!
I strongly agreed with your words, more and more talented designer and coder are entering into Blogger template coding, now we can see there's tons of wonderful and professional Blogger templates online!
I can see your hard work of studying and reviewing these Blogger templates, your professional spirit and works are what I need to learn and apply to my works. Thanks again for the sharing.
Thanks for this post and the information you've provided. I've seen a few of these around and was very impressed ans wondered where they came from. This is very helpful to a (somewhat) new blogger!
Amanda—
Thanks highlighting these examples from very talented designers. I love the wonderful intricacy of all the designs you've shown.
I wonder, however, if you might be able to also provide some direction on where one could go to find a very clean three column template for blogger (like minima, only with three columns instead of two) that can then be customized. As an artist, I'm very interested in having a blank canvas of sorts that I can make changes to, but I've yet to find this…. I'm sure its readily available, but I can't seem to use the right search terms in order to find it…
Hi Amanda,
Thanks for sharing these – great templates, its good to see more quality Blogger templates out there to rival the WordPress templates. I actually stumbled across your blog purely by accident, through a post by Kevin Muldoon, which then linked to your 'creating favicons' post. Good work and nice tidy blog.
Cheers
Don
Bad Design, Amanda…
I see all, one backgound!
Cheers,
José
Hi Amanda! I just see this post now because i was in holidays the last week at Punta Cana (Caribbean). Thank you very much for add my adaptation of Magazine in this post. I'm a loyal follower of your fantastic blog Blogger Buster.
Thank's and regards from Spain
So does this mean I must signup for the Spanish language site to download the template? That's where the link takes you.
You can find more at http://jomphp.com/75-beautiful-and-elegant-blogge…
spasibo – спасибо!
Magazeen – is there English website for instructions?
@ Patricia – You can have Magazeen's Spanish-language site translated using Google Translate: http://translate.google.com/
Hope that helps!