SixApart just released a really interesting tool to help owners of Movable Type websites customize their style. To learn more, read the announcement on the blog – “Introducing the Movable Type Design Assistant” – or head directly to the design assistant and start playing with it.
The assistant is a step-by-step wizard that starts with one of a few popular default templates, lets you choose from six standard column layouts, and tweak your CSS. At the end it shows clear directions for implementing your new design on your site.
I liked the column layout in particular; it really makes it easy to play around and visually find out what will work best for you. The CSS tweaking is pretty cool as well, letting you click on an element in the sample blog to bring up a selector for easy customization. It’s similar to the live CSS editing a tool like Firebug provides, but in a lighter manner.
The design assistant is open source (GPL), and they plan to continue improvements, so potentially this could become a powerful tool for adjusting Movable Type website styles.
