Designing a blog is easy. Whatever engine you are using and whatever style you prefer, you’ll always find a number of templates you can apply to your weblog in seconds. No styling is necessary, no playing with colors is needed and no mind jogging about content presentation is required. However, not every weblog should look like a typical blog. After all, not every blogger wants his or her site to look exactly like hundreds of other ones. In fact, there is a small bunch of creative, outstanding and individually designed from scratch blogs.
In this post we didn’t try to showcase some eye-candy (although sometimes eye-candy is indeed offered); the designs listed below were selected for their attention to small details. Pretty and colourful header-graphics doesn’t make a good blog. The blog needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of site elements; it also has to be able to build some kind of a bridge between the content and its presentation. To do this, you need to think about precision, minimalism and sound use of illustration. These criteria were the ones we’ve used to select the designs listed below. All these aspects make the designs we’ve selected look… well, not always beautiful, but outstanding, almost excellent in their own kind. Mostly it’s the idea the designers used to make the weblog as usable as possible – not the implementation of this idea – which we’ve been after.
Below you’ll find 45 excellent blog designs which impress with creative approaches and attention to details; hopefully you’ll find new ideas you can develop further in your own designs.
Notice that the screenshots we’ve provided may give you a wrong impression about the whole design of the sites; in doubt you should take a closer look at headers, footers, comment-areas, site structure and further site elements. Please also notice that you can click on screenshots to get to the sites from which the screenshots have been taken.
We’ve missed something? Definitely! Let us know in the comments!
