Update: Google has announced tah the Blogger Template Designer is now available to all (not just Blogger in Draft).

Original Article: Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

"Over the past few years we’ve worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."

Features of the template designer include:

– 15 new templates (with more on the way)
– Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
– Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
– Customizable colors, fonts, and more.

"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog’s design & layout – putting the user in complete control," the company says.

It’s interesting that this kind of customization has not been available from Blogger until 2010, as Blogger itself is over a decade old, and has been Google-owned since 2003.

The Blogger Template Designer is available through Blogger in Draft, Blogger’s testing ground/sandbox site.