SkyScribe Sites
The design wizard
The wizard is where you decide what your site looks like. It has two steps and a live preview, and it produces a Design Config — the saved record of your choices that SkyScribe uses to render the site.
You can open the wizard and play with it without signing in. Signing in is only needed to save a design, and an active subscription only to use it for a real site.
Step 1 — Choose a starter template
Pick one of the starter templates — Classical, Contemporary, or Futurist. Each is just a starting point: every colour, font, and layout choice is editable in the next step.
Step 2 — Customise
The customise step is a form on the left and a live preview on the right. The preview has tabs for the different page types — Home, Category, and Article — so you can see each as you work.
The form is grouped into sections:
| Section | What you set |
|---|---|
| Colours | Header, body, footer, side-menu and details-container backgrounds and text colours. The header, body, side-menu and footer backgrounds can be a solid colour or a gradient — see below |
| Typography | Google Font family, weight, size, and bold/italic for the heading, sub-heading, and body roles independently. Each role also has a Customise panel for an override colour, and — for headings and sub-headings — a text shadow |
| Header | Logo image, navigation menu style, splash image or video, call-to-action button, and a bottom border — see below |
| Body | Background and content colours for the main content area, the side menu's right border, and the details container's border and corner radius |
| Layout | The base template for the home, category, and article pages — Full, Compact, or Minimal |
| Footer | Footer content, its own navigation menu, and a top border |
Gradient backgrounds
The header, body, side menu and footer backgrounds can each be a solid colour or a gradient. Every other colour control (text colours, the details container, interactive elements) stays a single solid colour.
Each of those four background pickers has a Solid / Linear / Radial dropdown:
- Solid — a single colour, exactly as before.
- Linear — a straight colour fade. A dial sets the direction, with a degree box beside it for an exact angle.
- Radial — a colour fade radiating out from a point. Choose a circle or ellipse shape and where its centre sits on the 3×3 grid.
For Linear and Radial you get a gradient bar with colour stops. Drag a stop along the bar to move it, click an empty part of the bar to add one, and drag a stop off the bar to remove it (2–5 stops). Click a stop to set its colour — transparency is allowed, so you can fade a colour out to nothing.
Switching a picker from Solid to a gradient starts you off with a two-stop gradient based on your current colour; switching back to Solid keeps the first stop's colour.
Borders
The header (bottom edge), footer (top edge), side menu (right edge), and the details container (all four sides, plus its corner roundness) can each have a thin border. A width of 0 means no border — drag the slider up and a colour swatch appears next to it to pick the line's colour.
Saving
Save stores the current design as a Design Config. The first time, you give it a name (e.g. "Autumn blog redesign"); after that, Save updates the same config. Saving requires a Bluesky sign-in.
Your saved designs are listed on the Site Designs page (in the side menu). From there you can open one back up in the wizard to keep editing it, and you can have several — one per site, or several drafts of the same site.
Note
A saved Design Config isn't a live site yet. To use it, you connect it to a Publication on a Site Slot — see Launching & managing a site.
Next
Subscribing — what a subscription includes and how to get one.