For Movable Type-powered bloggers, designing blog might be easy and/or extremely difficult. You will need to deal with many template part called “modules”, “many types of templates”, etc.

But, if we use the default template system without touching the stylesheets and another template types, we probably will find benefits from the Design Styles menu. Go to Design – Styles. There are some ready-to-use styles we can use directly. If you need more styles, you can always get from MT4 Style Library.

All designs provided under Design – Style menu depend on stylesheets. So, the document structures are identical. Or, … we can say “the same”. Some elements in the sidebar can be maintained using widgets. Remember, we’re talking about the HTML structures from Movable Type default templates.

I think, the HTML structures are great for modification only using the stylesheet. Once, Six Apart hold a contest. It was about modification Movable Type design only by editing the stylesheet. You can see the archive at The Style Contest homepage.

For some bloggers, using Movable Type default templates is fine. But, what if they only want to change part of the design like font family, sizes, colors, etc. Reading many lines in the stylesheet might be confusing, right? To make this process easier, there is a handy tools called Movable Type Design Assistant. What does it do? Quoting from Movable Type Design Assistant main page:

• Lets you choose from a starting point based on common MT blog designs
• Helps you become familiar with MT’s default template set
• Assists in making style changes to your blog via CSS
• Offers live previews of edits you make to your styles
• Helps you customize individual sections of the page just by clicking
• Shows you how to apply your custom style to your blog

The step-by-step information are provided there. It’s very simple, but definitely useful. Visit MT Design Assistant at http://movabletype.org/design/assistant/