The first 10 Tips for Designing Photoblogs talked about how best to design a photoblog. However, it didn’t properly cover how to design and organize the actual images. That’s what we’re going to do now.

8 More Tips for Your Pictures

• Organize your photos. If your images have variety between them, it’s worth taking the time to categorize them clearly. For example, by type (Color or greyscale?) or by subject (People, Places etc). Tags would allow you to use a whole range of classifications.

Photoblogs have the very best looking content, no doubt about it. Why then can it be so hard to design a photoblog well? Surely the photos alone look good enough?

These 10 tips discuss the theme and design for the blog/gallery, and I’ll be following it up later with a post on how to organize and display the images well.

My 10 Tips for Styling Your Blog

• Use neutral colors. When photographing people, you never know what they will wear so you use a neutral background. The same applies to your design. You need a background color that works with all your photos (e.g. The black background here is perfect against the Northern Light photos of all colors.)

Your environment rubs off on you.

Want to be a better photographer? Browse Flickr.
Want to write better? Read great authors.
Want to be optimistic? Hang out with optimists.

It’s a simple principle, and it applies to design as well.

Want to have better taste in design? Surround yourself with beautiful things.

There are hundreds of sources of inspiration surrounding us every day, but for a web designer, the most obvious are simply other web sites.

It’s the final saga in our quest to decide What Makes Good Blog Design? and today we are coming to one simple truth, good design looks good. That much is obvious, but good looks are for more than just looking at.

You don’t design a blog to print it out and hang it on your wall to be admired and you don’t design it to keep up with the Joneses. Stunning designs are good simply because they get you more readers.

This is the 3rd article in our attempt to answer the question of What Makes a Good Design?. We’ve already covered site goals and user goals, but those only take effect when the use is actually on your site. What about when they’re elsewhere? Or even offline?

A purpose-built, usable blog is great, but if it isn’t strikingly designed, it will be forgotten! If a visitor reads your iPod article today, what is it that will make them think of you the next time they’re looking for iPod info?

Be different. Be unique. Be memorable. And here’s how:

Image by Felipe SkroskiIf you’re reading this, then I imagine you have an interest in blog design. Together, we invest huge amounts of time into tweaking our blogs, or huge amounts of money into paying others to do so. But how do we know our design is actually worth all that effort?

What is it that makes a good blog design?

The 4 Aspects of Good Design

There are many factors, but we can wrap the main ones under 4 umbrellas. These are what I would consider the main elements of a good blog design to be.

1. Achieve Site Goals - What is your purpose for having the blog? What do you want visitors to do?
Click to continue reading »

Dominik Lenk recently asked an interesting question; What are the essential elements of a blog?

In reply I would say that there are very few essentials. It is your blog, and its up to you what you want to include. The only essentials would be to include the basics that you see on every blog, such as a search function, category lists and comment forms.

However, this did lead me onto another question. It is one thing to know the features that technically make a blog a blog, but what is it that makes a blog look like a blog?