Blog Design

Blog Design Showcase Consider this a website field trip

“ the measure of intelligence is knowing how little you know”

transparency can lead to a more credible brand

A Blog is..

a regularly updated site containing links to pages the author finds interesting, typically with commentary attached

Sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and even a bit of political purpose

Do as I say, not as Rubel does

Be selective

You don’t have to link to everything..

Try and make your own versions of icons

Use alternate symbols from everyone else

Especially for common things like PDF or RSS

Don’t use full color icons

Try grey scale

Wunderkammern and the birth of the museum as we know it

Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammer or wonder-rooms) were collections of types of objects we now regard as quite separate, but whose boundaries were in the Renaissance yet to be defined.

A great blog is..

Informative and sexy

Simple

Based on beautiful typography

At times, funny

Small pieces, loosely joined

Blogs are almost all about Typography…

Words are all that you have to work with (For the most part..)

Readability vs. Usability

Steal from the best

Look at great blogs, it will rub off on you

Keep your enemies close

Monitor your competition

shauninman.com

Website Field Trip

Make sure you have your permission slips signed!

Mp3 Blogs

a blog that hosts downloadable music in the MP3 audio file format.

www.fzelders.nl/weblog

peel

It’s like an RSS reader just for MP3s.

Image heavy blogs

Advertising blogs

Photo blogs

sandeepmakam.blogspot.com

syndication

One of your goals could be to get featured by your local gothamist

How?

Contact the editors

Be persistent

Have good content to pitch

Don’t be annoying about it

Cameron Moll

Cameronmoll.com

Authentic Boredom is the platitudinous web home of Cameron Moll. Is it ‘Mall’ or ‘Mull’ you ask? It’s ‘Mall.’ The correct pronunciation, however, is actually ‘Mull,’ as the surname is Germanic. But for the love of Pete, please don’t pronounce it as ‘Mole.’

Daring Fireball

Simplicity is key.

Daringfireball.net

Use humor where possible

On DFs contact page

I encourage you to send me your comments regarding Daring Fireball. Unfortunately, I am at times a lousy correspondent — where by “at times” I mean “most of the time”. If I don’t respond to your email, or do so only after an inordinate amount of time has passed, please don’t take it personally.

The Contact page

It’s one of the most important things you can do for yourself

Think about it like a business card

Except you can have a form that collects data

So think of it as a better business card!

security

Display your email as an image

Use (dot) instead of your real email address

Get Creative!

Use humor..

Be transparent about why

Jason Santa Maria

jasonsantamaria.com

Sexy and informative!

Jason Santa Maria is a Graphic Designer living in sunny Philadelphia, PA with his wife Liz and three cats. He serves as Creative Director for Happy Cog Studios, both in New York and Philadelphia. This status grants him access to most black-tie galas and groundbreaking ceremonies.

Drop caps

Create an image for each letter, a.gif, b.gif and put in a folder called “letters”

www.yoursite.com/letters/a.gif

Switch the corresponding letter on and off..

Build it in to your default post

kottke

What kottke.org might be, a list:

The personal site of Jason Kottke. But also his full-time gig.

A weblog, which is a frequently updated, chronologically ordered collection of hypertext fragments. You'll find the most recent posted stuff on the front page and many ways to get at the older posts on the archive page.

Etcetera

etcetera.com.ro/blog/

This blog is called etcetera. And it’s ours as it is yours, also. If you are into graphic-design-post-consumerism-retro-futurology-how-it-looks-area, you’ll certainly like visiting us for your daily-design-dose!

Use your own screenshots

But stealing is second best..

Steal from the best

You can always customize the stolen screenshot

That means you need to know photoshop

But just the basics are required

Screenshot mumbo-jumbo

Screenshot

Outputting the entire screen in a common format such as BMP, PNG, or JPEG.

Screen dump

The display system dumps what it is using internally upon request, PDF in the case of Mac OS X. As of Mac OS X 10.4, pictures are no longer saved as PDF. They are saved as PNGs. (which can be annoying)

Screen capture

Capturing the screen over an extended period of time to form a Video file.

Flickr feed

Get creative!

Know the boundaries

Include a link to your flickr rss

Know the sizes flickr automatically produces

Flickr natively supported blog platform

Atom Enabled Blogs

Blogger

Blogger Beta*

LiveJournal

Manila

Movable Type

Typepad

Vox

WordPress

Blogging flickr images

Lightbox

Take those flickr images and do something with them

I use lightbox on my portfolio site

www.jess3.com

Snap preview

I use snap on my blog

www.jess3.com/blog

You can preview internal and external links

Building this from scratch is untheisable

It would require you to cache all the websites in the world.

You can customize a little bit

Adding your logo aint bad

Google Analytics

It used to be called Urchin

Then google bought them and changed the name to Analytics

It’s free

It’s free and it looks amazing

By free I mean $0.00

Image Search Results

If you title your images relevantly and you do a couple other things right

You will get hits from people searching for images

Same rule applies for flickr

And YouTube has tags to

17% aint bad..

Blog networking

9rules

MyBlogLog

Del.icio.us

Social bookmarking

Flickr

It is a social network….

Facebook

And myspace too!

Del.icio.us

Start the conversation right

If you don’t. someone else will

Or worse.. No one will at all

MyBlogLog

Its free

Yahoo bought them

Make friends

Meet people!

9rules

Quality loves company

9rules is an online community of blogs and Blogger.

They have over 200 members, each hand-picked out of thousands that apply to join.

In the past, applications have been handled in submission rounds, occurring roughly twice a year and giving applicants a 24-hour window to submit their blog. Their fifth membership round attracted 1,190 new submissions.

Yahoo owns