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Blog Design Trends

December 30 2005
by Rachel
78 comments

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Here’s a summary of some of the common blog design trends out there right now which may give you some inspiration:

  • Big fonts: Gone are the days when only 11pt Verdana was cool. Big fonts for headers (and even content) are back on many blogs – such as Garrett Dimon’s blog or Whitespace (which, by the way, has recently discussed the merits of big text.)
    Big fontsWhitespace
  • Top border: a tonne of sites now have a thin top border spanning the width of the window, irrespective of the width of the rest of the design. It’s usually 5 or 6 pixels high. Examples include: A List Apart, Tech Crunch, Whitespace, GigaOM
  • Big headers/footers: Sites like Juque, Read/Write Web, Business Logs, The Hot Crew use contrasting or even subtle colours to make their large headers and/or footers stand out. These will span the full width of the window, while the rest of the content is much narrower. Big footer
  • Bright colours: Fill boxes with bright colours with a subtle vertical gradient and you get sites such as 9rules, Blinksale, Serene Green, Fruitcast.
  • Speech bubble comments: Adding a little more interest to comments as seen at hicksdesign and Digg, among many others.
  • Rounded corners: CSS techniques are making these easier to pull off and they’re turning up everywhere.
  • Highlighted links: Links aren’t underlined but their background colour is different – often a pale yellow.

I’ll add more sites that fit into these design trend categories as I come across them.

Have you seen any blog design trends lately that I’ve missed off?

Update: See this follow-up post: The Content-Rich Footer

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