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7 Blog Design Trends for 2006

Posted By Darren Rowse 2nd of January 2006 Blog Design 0 Comments

Rachel over at cre8d design (with a new design on her own blog) outlines seven Blog Design Trends for 2006. She gives examples of each (and in the process points out some of the most beautifully designed blogs going around). The 7 trends Rachel outlines are:

  1. Big fonts
  2. Top border
  3. Big headers/footers
  4. Bright colours
  5. Speech bubble comments
  6. Rounded corners
  7. Highlighted links
About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Uh oh….

    this means I’m not trendy?

    Geeky is trendy…

    I’m a Geek…

    Error…

    Cannot process input…

    ………………………….

    brem

  2. Happy new year!

    As Darren always say, Blog Design is another way to build relation and traffic with your reader. Just now I visit all the examples that Rachel gave, and I found 1 thing – I feel “fresh” when I visit those blogs. Maybe I read a lot of blog (Include mine that I always read daily) and I always hope to see some new blog design. When going to a blog with new design, I think the feeling of “fresh” will make me back. I think it is time for me to make my site fresh!

  3. i’m geeky

  4. Hey Rachel … I think you’re spot on. Big fonts, simplier colors, less clutter. I think it started with the perfromancing.com design … very, very basic, easy on the eye etc.,

    I like the trend to the “less is more” in blogging that I see more and more every day.

  5. i like small fonts, nice colours, it is to be very attractive for everyone

    HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR 2006

    latest gadgets review

  6. Big is just a momentary fad…won’t last, all ready getting tired. Same with the color green. The other big problem is that everything is big, everything has the same weight/importance, no emphasis. Of course, that makes it easy, you don’t have to make any value judgements on what is important and what isn’t. Not everything is.
    Advertising/Marketing/Design 101…they all fail.

  7. Agree with PXLated, I think its a fad, a bit like Web 2.0, we’ll see a lot of it this year but at the end of the day if the fundamentals aren’t right (ie content) it won’t make a difference.

  8. I think the main think in design is to give the reader what they want, and not a heap of gimmicks and ads. By trying to get bigger titles, it is also helping with accessibility, and getting the reader where they want to be.

  9. Gotta respectfully disagree with you Duncan & PXLated. I think this move to more simplicity is a natural tendency away from the cluttered feel many blogs have become.

  10. Martin…Simplicity is good but this goes beyond simplicity…Time will tell but my bet is still on fad.

  11. PXLated – you may very well be right, I guess you’d be in a better position to know than me seeing you’re in the design game and I’m about as design-challenged as they come :-)

    Why not a middle ground then? Maybe last year it got too cluttered, this year will be too simple so it might eventually settle somewhere in between.

  12. Martin…I think getting something down to as simplest a form as possible is usually good and I don’t have an argument with simplicity itself. But I don’t see simplicity as the main fad part in this, it’s the individual elements in the list of seven. Simplicity might allow one to make things bigger but even that is not required for simplicity. All seven are merely style and will change.
    ;-)

  13. PXLated – I take your point … so simplicity is okay, whatever happened to white space rather than having to fill in the page – can’t get more simple that that.

    I wonder then if big desing/elements is simply taking over from white space.

  14. Martin…”I wonder then if big desing/elements is simply taking over from white space.”
    Not all but in a lot of cases yes because “big” is in.
    I think the bigger thing I see in sites using these trends is the creators make everything big. All buttons are big. All headlines are big. All text is big. There is no differentiation between what’s important and what is not. There is no place to focus.
    Not all things on a page or in a blog are created equal and shouldn’t be treated as such.
    ;-)

  15. How about keeping it simple? Like I did on http://www.apnijobs.com

  16. good observations.

    I’ve noticed them too on many blogs.

  17. just confidence with your own style. dude

  18. […] Da problogger un post che punta dritto a un altro… con tutte le regole per avere blog graficamente à la page. Ve lo traduco molto velocemente qui per rendervi le cose più semplici: […]

  19. Fad or not, I’m sure glad that styles change instead of just staying static :)

    Who wants to live in a world where everything looks the same? Some like big, some like small…I personally like a mix between the two. If everything’s too small I find it hard to find anything, if everything’s too big, well, the same problem, right?

    Here’s to diversity in 2006.

    Cheers!

  20. […] ProBlogger links to a post on blog design trends written by Rachel Cunliffe in the cre8d design blog. Cunliffe, in her post, enumerates elements of current blog design trends: big fonts, big headers and footers, top border, bright colors, speech bubble comments, rounded corners, highlighted links. […]

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  22. […] Reality Tagging via.Big IDEA Blog Design Trends (via: problogger) via.블로그 나라 블로깅 넷 국내 설치형 블로그 비교표 dPolls.com via.TechCrunch […]

  23. Interesting. Perhaps the best thing to do here is the opposite, so as to stand out from the crowd.

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