I’ve never been in love with my blog’s template and I don’t care for most of the other Blogger templates. Anybody have suggestions on where I could and should get a new look?

I hesitate to suggest TypePad because they’ve been having some problems with their growth. However, I think their template wizards are easy to use and whether or not you use one of their stock templates or use the wizard, they tend to be cleaner than others.

Also, a lot of people have been “skinning” MovableType and Wordpress, which means essentially developing templates that you can drop into your install.
See http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/2005/08/stylecatcher_pu.html
and
http://www.movalog.com
and
http://www.learningmovabletype.com

I think movalog has a template wizard they’ve developed for MovableType.

Still, coming from blogger, both Wordpress and MT might be a huge leap and frankly, not always worth the effort. Another hosted service similar to TypePad is Squarespace (squarespace.com). They seem to have a nice aesthetic.

I think I wasn’t clear in my original post. I’m looking for skins (I think) for blogger, rather than changing my service. However, I’m listening to people’s experiences with other services, so keep giving me that info as well.

Oops. Sorry. Don’t know much about blogger.

I was under the impression Blogger had some new stuff since I’d been there - someone I know has changed her template twice recently and both were quite good looking for a free service. You used to be able to tinker with the template on Blogger yourself, but it helps to know what you are doing (all I ever did was change fonts and colours and put in a few extra headings).

Blogger has better templates these days, but I still would like something different I think. I chose my current template the last time they announced they had new templates.
And yes, you can play with your template. I’ve done some of that, but not a great deal. I don’t know enough and I’m afraid I’d just screw it all up.

Agreed - it’s not much fun unless you understand CSS (I don’t ). And I think what Typepad has done much better is to supply categories and make blogrolling easier - at a price.
Weirdwriter, I know you don’t want to change platforms, but Wordpress has recently opened a blogging platform (i.e. as with Blogger, you can run your blog from their site). It might be worth signing up for a free blog which you password protect while you have a play with the tools just to see if you like them. I have found it has features which Typepad charges for. See http://www.wordpress.com.
Last word from me on this as I know I am not really answering your original question at all!

Through a comment I saw on lagringa.blogspot.com, I think I’ve found one place that offers templates for blogger, and maybe just what I want. It’s here: http://thrbrtemplates.blogspot.com/ I haven’t checked deeply into it as I’m at work now, but it may be the kind of thing I need.

Oh good stuff. Glad you found something. Thur mentions a Blogger Forum too - that might be worth a look. Good luck.

Here’s another one found at the Blogger Forum. It’s called Blogger Templates:
http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/
I figured I’d post these here in case anybody else is looking for templates besides me.