Designing blogs Smashing Magazine: Blog design study

Last update: July 26, 2008

Reading time: 1 minute

Studying web design is nothing new in academic research. While much of this research focuses on usability, the Smashing Magazine now draws attention to another aspect: the design. The authors draw on the 50 largest blogs listed in the Technorati Top Blogs. Social networks and blogs that have become popular through techniques such as backlinks in Wordpress themes were excluded.

The first part of the results deals with layout and typography and comes to the following conclusions:

58% of blogs use three or more columns, 42% only two.
Almost all blogs (94%) are centered in the browser window.
92% of all blogs have a fixed width that does not change even when the font is enlarged; mostly (56%) between 951 and 1000 pixels.
On average, 58% of this width is used for the actual content.
A welcome development: 90% of these layouts are CSS-based.

In terms of typography, the study reports that…

98% use dark text on a light background (and not the other way around),
the most common number of characters per line (34%) is between 85 and 94,
Verdana (34%) and Lucida Grande (24%) are often used for body text, while Arial (30%) and Georgia (22%) are used for headlines, and
body text is often 12 px (24 %) or 13 px (30 %) and headlines are 20-22 px (24 %) or 23-25 px (22 %). Relative values were converted to pixel size.

Further results can be found in the Smashing Magazine; the second part will follow next week. Figures like these can help to get a first idea of the design decisions of successful blogs. However, this does not say anything about whether the decisions were right or can even be considered guidelines for your own designs. Design is a creative and thoughtful process that cannot be reduced to empirical figures.