From TypePad's knowledge base:
Why Use Custom CSS
When a user converts their design to use advanced templates they sacrifice certain weblog design and configuration features for the advantage of being able to modify the page's HTML directly. Using Custom CSS to modify your weblog's design allows you to retain all of these features while also keeping the convenience of all of TypePad's design features and capabilities.
How To Use Custom CSS
To use the Custom CSS feature, navigate to the Design area for one of your weblogs. Then click the Edit Custom CSS link next to the Change Layout and Change Theme links. You will be taken to a screen with a large text field. Type your custom CSS information into this field.
The information you enter will be appended to the end of your existing stylesheet. This will override any custom CSS properties and existing CSS properties that may have been defined elsewhere.
Nice. There are a number of tweaks I've wanted to make on TypePad sites that would have involved CSS, but it wasn't worth it to make the switch to an "advanced template" and lose the ability to use TypePad's very cool drag-and-drop layout editing. More cake for everybody!
Now all I have to is actually learn CSS.
UPDATE: It works. I just tightened up the top and bottom borders around my banner by adding the following to the Custom CSS:
#banner {height: 160px; background-position:16px 10px; }
I was pretty pissed at TypePad over the the outages a few weeks ago, but I have to say that I love the feature set. I really hope they can scale up and put the downtime and latency issues behind them.
UPDATE: TypePad stores this site's CSS at <a href="http://www.edbatista.com/styles.css">http://www.edbatista.com/styles.css</a>, simply enough. Scroll down to the /* user css */ section at the bottom to see the line I added. I generally understand how each element's attributes work within CSS--the basic concept seems similar to HTML--but I'm not sure what components of the site are governed by the various CSS sections. Complicating matters further, I'm not sure whether there's a universal CSS taxonomy, or whether TypePad uses special terms to describe things like sidebars. (I'd like to change the spacing of the sidebar elements, which seem to fall under the /* modules */ section of the CSS. We'll see.)
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