Design Tips - 5 Basic Principles To Create Pleasing-Looking Blog Design

Blog design is a bit different than ordinary website design. Blogs use specific sections and components that no other sites contain. While designing a blog design you have to remember that blog site is all about content and text formating is a king. In this article I will share with you my yop 5 basic principles to create good-lloking blog design.

1. Choosing the right colors - Colors are one of the most crucial elements of good design. Every color present different feelings and emotions your visitors can experience while visitng your site. As you maybe already noticed most blog designs incorporate light colors, mostly white backgrounds with simple design. The right thing to do is to choose 2, max 3 main colors that will dominate in your site. To do it correct you have to choose those colors that looks together good, some colors like green and pink won't look too good as far as the intensifity will be tweaked. Perhaps on the first looks colors have no possibility to looks good but after making them a bit darker or less intense you will be able to find some interesting color connection. To be more original I suggest you to try to mix main colors like orange-red, choose this between color and play with intens, saturation, brightness.2. Text formatting - that's what makes blog so special. That's very important blog design tip to close attention. Blogs are like online journals, personal space for people to share theirs thoughts, opinions and stories. In standard blogs text is the most important part, it's a content. That's why you should take an extra time to make sure that your text formatting looks good and is accurrate to style of design and topic. Always use CSS styles to format your text. With CSS you have wide selection of option you can choose, the most important are: font-family, text-size, color, line-height (space between each line), font-style (italic or bold); letter-spacing (space between each letter). The most important thing here is to format your text that it looks nice and clean. It needs to be easy to read, with some space and rest for eye.3. Logo - another crucial blog design tip - logo, name of your blog need to be always on top. It's your brand so I suggest you to place it always on top left. That's how people will recognize your blog. To crate a good logo you should consider trying some interesting fonts, nothing to fancy or curly, although it's all depends on your style. The best is to make it sharp, clean and readable. The logo should present the main subject of your site, blog name should be standing up the design, it should be easily recognizable in your blog design. Colors should connect with your whole-site composition, it should all connect.4. Design construction - in blog design you should have at least one menu. It can be on top, left, right and bottom. I found menu on right the most intuitive as the most important content is on left and manu is just an addition. Menus on top is always a great idea but don't exaggerate and add too many sections there, you shoudl place ther 4,5 main ones and more in left/right menu. Bottom menu is great for mybloglog widget, about me, friends links or anything else. You may have each blog post in different box or all at one white background. It's all depends on you. I suggest you to always try make your design connected. Connect header with menu and footer. Don't make everything flying messy. Try to find a balance and make it intuitive so people won't have a problem to find anything.5. RSS Feed - It's very important element that just need to be included always in blog design. It's good to use feedburner widget to show number of subscribers and include big RSS icon in top of blog design. It need to be easy to find and as high as possible. It's more connected to blog marketing but also as a designer you should be aware of it. If the blog is connected to internet marketing and related there need to be an form where you cna fill name and e-mail. Most likely people are offering some ebooks or reports that's why this form box should have space for ebook picture, header text and 2 forms with and pleasing submit button.

I hope these blog design tips will help you to create better blog designs and understand better these kind of sites. It's a very specific sites that are right now very popular. If you wil consider and think about all these 5 main principles before designing and blog you should do very well. For more tips and ideas go to some popular blogs and analyze theirs designs. It's a great way to expand your creativity and understand blog sites.