The Great Style Revival

Over the past several months we've made a tremendous effort to continually improve the Squarespace experience. We've released beautiful new templates, expanded our help system, and built in powerful features like slideshows that you've always wanted. Today, we're thrilled to push that effort even further and offer a colossal update to all areas related to templates in Squarespace.

13 TEMPLATE REDESIGNS, 85 NEW STYLES, 2 BRAND-NEW TEMPLATES

Our templates have served us well over the years, but the time has come to reinterpret the Squarespace classics and improve our entire collection.  In this release, we redesigned every template in the system, top to bottom. We explored everything — color, fonts, button styles, key art, and the overall proportion — to ready our templates for an evolving web and far beyond.  In addition to the 13 template redesigns with 85 new styles, 2 brand-new templates (Principle and Transfigure) are included in this update.  

GOOGLE WEB FONTS – ALL OF THEM

You asked for Google's complete web font library, and here it is. Over 300 fonts are now fully integrated within Squarespace, giving you an unprecedented selection of fonts to choose from. There’s nothing for you to install, no Javascript to add, no CSS to write. Everything is available within the Fonts, Colors & Sizes menu. It's like magic.

DEVELOPER-FRIENDLY CSS EDITOR 

As web designers and developers, we know how limiting it could be to write and edit CSS within a small window. Now you can do it all within our beautiful new editor; pop out the entire window and see everything at once. The new editing toolbar allows you to find & replace, undo & redo (even post-save), insert style variables, and format your code like a pro. 3 new color themes are also available for easy-on-the-eyes editing. 

AND MUCH MORE...

• Add style to your blog post elements with 8 new icon sets, available in both black and white and 4 different sizes. 
• Keep the background image but change the color thanks to alpha-transparent PNGs available in many of the redesigned templates.
• Customize buttons in the new styles, like “search” and “submit”, right within Fonts, Colors & Sizes.

There’s a lot to explore within Style mode and you can access the full set of features right away. Enjoy!

Participating in Bpeace

Last week Squarespace was privileged to serve as a host company for Bpeace, a non-profit network of business professionals who volunteer their skills to entrepreneurs in conflict-affected countries. In partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, Bpeace's goal is to create one million jobs across 1000 communities, with the simple belief that more jobs mean less violence. Bpeace Fast Runners are remarkable entrepreneurs from countries like Afghanistan and Rwanda. They all share the vision that employment is the bridge to better education, less poverty, improved health, and ultimately, less violence.

We had the pleasure of hosting two Fast Runners from Afghanistan, both young entrepreneurs, in our office for two days. Reza owns a web and software development company. Farangis is a civil engineer who recently founded her own web hosting and design services provider.

Reza and Farangis spent time with many on our team, with discussions ranging from an overview of our industry, building a successful business, personnel management, strategic and financial planning, sales and marketing, IT and data center infrastructure, and PHP and JavaScript coding. In return we had the opportunity to learn about Afghani perceptions of American business, the challenges of the local business environment in Kabul, female entrepreneurship in their culture, and much more.

Squarespace is proud to have participated in Bpeace, and we look forward to continuing to help Reza and Farangis via email and Skype, and to participating again in 2012.