Cats Love Rounders

The template you're looking at right now - the color palette the rounded corners, the overall design of the page apart from the text poured into it - is called Rounders. It was designed by Douglas Bowman of San Francisco based design consultancy Stopdesign.com in February of 2004. It's one of the available templates on Blogger, and I chose it for Living with Bengals.

Granted, there are only so many templates available, and an awful lot of Blogger blogs using them. But I've been noticing that cat blogs seem particularly attracted to the Rounders template for some reason.

Obviously there's myself. Then there's Enrevanche, which I discovered when it hosted a recent installment of Carnival of the Cats.

Then there's New Cat City, previously referenced here, who uses Rounders 3, the same template with a different color palette. (There are four variations all together.)

And finally, The Cat Pack, another fine cat blog I was going to make reference to here before realizing I had a larger story on my hands. The Cat Pack is the product of a couple with five cats, cleverly named Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Angie Dickinson. Anyone cool enough to name their cats after the rat pack is okay with me - go check them out.

But why so much Rounders? Is there something about the cat-favoring personality that's drawn to the gentle corners? Is it something subliminal about the word rounders?

I just don't know. Science marches on though, and I'm sure I'll come up with a working hypothesis eventually.