It’s time for yet another round of the Bloggies (the site just went down - looks like someone didn’t pay their hosting bill, oops!) Voting closes at the end of the month, so be in quick. This year the best designed weblog nominees are as follows (all comments are my own):

• Kottke - the design here is so subtle and yet the splash of yellow is so Kottke’s brand. I love the header’s design, the band of colours and the text in the footer. His sidebar isn’t over the top and it’s really clear who’s blog it is immediately. I’m not so sure why a lot of the text are images (e.g. the entire intro paragraph, more links, header links). As of right now, there’s 55 validation errors but almost all of them are links with entities (e.g. &) in them. However, it seems to me that the design is rather tired… it’s looked pretty much like this for so long, I’m not sure I want it to win the 2006 award. Total page size: 152KB.
• Delicious Days - the first thing I have to say I love is the favicon! So cute! The colours and rounded photos of food just makes me want to stop and read this blog. Thought has gone into how recipes will appear - the dotted lines and indentation are nice touches. I found the search box momentarily confused (I was trying to click under Search) and if you turn off images, the top navigation disappears completely, along with the sidebars. The code validates though. Total page size: 526KB… yikes!
• Karen Cheng - I love the hand-drawn feel to the site, and it’s great to see a photo of Karen on the home page, makes it seem a friendly place and I just want to smile along with her. There’s a sense of space and lack of clutter here. It failed validation, so I’m not sure how many errors there were because it contained some weird characters somewhere on her page. Total page size: 174KB.
• Joshuaink -Aside from Joshua’s hilarious style of writing, the design is simply stunning: bright, creative, happy, mmm! One little change and the code will validate. One of the most original designs out there. Total page size: 533KB… but 123KB of it is the garden image.
• Subtraction 7.0 - there’s something classy about a largely black-and-white site and Khoi pulls it off with ease. Simple but effective. I love the way he organises all the content in a grid style. The code validates nicely. Total page size: 152KB (38KB of it is the dog photo).

My pick I’d love to see Joshuaink take out the award for such a beautiful design which stands out a mile from other blogs. Runner-up pick: for functionality and organisation, I’d like to see Subtraction 7.0 be recognised.

Last year’s winner was talented Claire Robertson’s gorgeous blog Loobylu.

What are your thoughts on the finalists?