Kitchen Sink-ism Just a Fad – Lesson in Blog Design

As part of the WordCount Blogathon, today I am trading blog posts with Harry Marks over at CuriousRat.com. I feel very fortunate to have met Harry and am delighted to introduce his post on the keys to minimal blog design.

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When blogging first started, the running theme on 99% of blogs was to throw on as many animated GIFs and advertisements as possible because it made your blog “more interesting”. It didn’t. It was like peering into the Ark of the Covenant.

Trends have shifted – and for the better. Bloggers (for the most part) are opting for minimalism over “kitchen sink-ism” and the results are astounding. Never before have blogs been as engaging or as readable as they are now. Here are three popular blogs that have mastered minimal design and focused on content, rather than ads or widgets:

1. DaringFireball.net: John Gruber’s DaringFireball is light gray text on a dark gray background. There are no comments, no tags and no categories. The only ads displayed are very subdued ads by the Deck and they are much more relative to the content on Gruber’s site than anything produced by Google. On the left side of the site is a navigation bar, but even those pages are just as simple as the home page. If you want a really stripped-down design for your blog, DaringFireball.net should be your model.
2. KungFuGrippe.com: Productivity guru Merlin Mann’s website, Kung Fu Grippe, is not as bare-bones as DaringFireball, but is still impeccably minimalistic. The page is white with a massive header image (of Mr. Mann himself), a simple navigation bar and three columns of content. It’s almost like reading a newspaper. Scroll down to read the posts, or look left and right to access deeper areas of the site. Kung Fu Grippe is a Tumblr blog and Tumblr designs tend to focus less on “flair” and more on content. Bonus: Click “Archives” to access a sick visual breakdown of previous months.
3. HiveLogic: Dan Benjamin is a podcaster and Internet entrepreneur whose blog, HiveLogic, is used to, among other things, pimp all the random projects he’s working on. It’s a very narrow site in terms of design – there’s a substantial header that rests above two columns: a wide one for content and a skinnier one for ads/search/projects/etc. all on top of an off-white background. The site is easily readable due to the fact that the ads don’t disrupt the content - it’s very subtle. What’s interesting is that his post titles and ad plugs are written in a sans serif font, while the body text is written in a serif font. One might think it would clash, but it works quite well and breaks things up.

Some key tips for a minimal blog design:

• Keep ads and “badges” to a minimum. They can get very distracting.
• Focus on showcasing your content. People come to your blog to read your work, not look at all the pretty pictures (unless they’re part of your post, of course).
• Avoid loud color schemes. Just because your blog focuses on the totally bodacious fashions of the ’80s does not mean your site has to feature a neon pink header and “electric” green background. Conversely, minimal doesn’t have to mean “plain”. You can always spruce things up without going overboard.
• A clear, readable typeface goes a long way. If you’re going to invest time and money into your blog, make one of those investments a great typeface.

Using the above blogs as inspiration, take a look at your own and see if there’s something you could do to “trim the fat”. Maybe you could change your fonts, or decrease the amount of ads in the sidebar. No matter what, focus on what keeps your readers coming back – your content.

Harry Marks is a freelance tech writer based in New Jersey and owner of CuriousRat.com, a blog that comments on current technology events. In addition to CuriousRat.com, Harry is managing editor and a tech journalist for theRugged.com, an online men’s lifestyle magazine.

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