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.)
  
• 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.
• 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

Just submitted my paper, “Investigating the use and usefulness of instant messaging in an elementary statistics course” for ICOTS 7, to be held in Salvador, Brazil next year.

Abstract:

Instant messaging is a way of sending short messages to other users who are currently online in “real time” and is a rapidly growing medium by which many students are choosing to communicate with each other. A pilot study into the use of instant messaging was carried out with two large elementary statistics classes. This study will report back on the virtual office-hours service, advantages and disadvantages of online study groups and reflections on how instant messaging could change help-support services for students studying statistics.

I’ve been working on this research on and off for the last couple of years, so it’s great to finally have a paper with some results in it, rather than just discussing the concept. As soon as the paper is available online, I’ll link up.

We’ll be taking a bit of a holiday while in South America and plan to check out: Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Igacu Falls, the Amazon and Peru - including Machu Picchu.

I used to think it was cheating by starting off a new web project by looking at some design galleries for inspiration. Not to copy, but just to get my creativity started up. Now, I realise that almost all artists, in whatever field they specialise, need to see new things regularly to keep them inspired and thinking creatively. I have a little scrapbook I snip out cuttings from magazines, rave invites, photographs, postcards and so on that I often flip through. I also have a long list of online galleries I’ll go visit - which got me thinking about my toolkit: the sites I find invaluable when creating new blogs or websites. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few things, so I’ll be back to add to it.

For inspiration

• Unmatched Style
• CSS Import
• CSS Reboot
• Liquid Designs
• CSS Vault
• Stylegala
• Web Standards Awards
• Netdiver
• Zen Garden

For fonts

• Dafont
• Fontleech

For images

• Stock Exchange

For colours

• COLOURlovers
• Color Schemer

For lists

• Listamatic

For filler text

• Lorem Ipsum

For checking

• W3 Validator
• Safari tester

What’s in your toolbox that I’m missing?

I was wandering around the shops the other day and cringed when I saw a Texas Holdem cap similar to this one for sale. Anyone who’s been blogging for some time will have unfortunately had run ins with spam from Mr T Holdem.

On second thought, the cap might be a fun gift to give to a guy like Darren.

I’m giving Akismet, the default spam plugin which ships with Wordpress 2.0 a go and hope I’ll find it as useful as Spam Karma is on my Wordpress 1.5.x blogs. It’s a little frustrating to set up however, as you have to create an account on Wordpress.com with a dummy blog just to get your API key. I’ll let you know how I get on with it.

Having designed blogs now for three years, I’ve seen a tonne of changes in the blogosphere - not only in software improvements, but also in the scope that blogs cover - from blogs for businesses and non-profit organisations and professional bloggers to blogging software being used as an inexpensive way to manage website content.

Here’s a few of my predictions for blog design work in 2006:

1. More businesses will jump on board with blogging, now that major players such as Yahoo! have hosted Wordpress and MovableType business blogging hosted plans. They’ll need to be able to integrate their current branding into their blog, without losing the blog’s edge. Many current traditional web developers will need to get up to speed with these platforms, or they will begin to outsource to blog design specialists. There’s always a lag time between a massive amount of hype and general business uptake - 2006 will see more and more businesses dip their toes into blogging. (And not just the tech companies.)
2. More and more non-profit organisations will also find topical blogging and podcasting a way to quickly disseminate information in times of crisis or appeal campaigns. Many will turn to specialised products such as CivicSpace (which is based on Drupal) to get them up and running. Specialists who work with Drupal will be in demand.
3. Plugin development - more commerical plugins will be written for Wordpress and MovableType, based on specialist requirements as people push the envelope with blogging software usage. Tools integrating blogging software with other systems such as Basecamp’s TaDa list will emerge.
4. Design trends: people will want blogs that “don’t look like blogs” - sites which tightly package their new content in RSS feeds but aren’t in the traditional reverse-chronological ordering. Brighter colors and larger fonts will continue to be used.
5. Everyone will want AJAX (just because it’s cool). We’ll get tired of many of the AJAX gimmicks really quickly (remember animated gifs anyone?) but the best uses will be subtle ones, such as those which make forms more usable.