In What Makes a Design Good?, I talked about the technical aspects of a good design, like site and user goals, branding, and distinction.

I did not however answer the question of what makes a design look good. What makes one blog visually attractive, but makes another one ugly?

There is no mathematical solution, but there is an artsy one. A good looking design is a combination of a number of factors. If your blog succeeds in each of these areas, then the overall effect will be an appealing design.

Image by Nir Tober.

The web is a colorful place. It’s easy to choose any color you can imagine, and put it into your design. No mixing paints, and no worrying about color-printing costs.

It’s easy to have a colorful web page, and very tempting to do so. But what is the alternative?

Monochromatic Design

Monochromatic design is design with one color. You select a single base color, and then add white and black to it to produce different shades of that color.

Your design consists solely of your monochromatic palette, and various shades of gray.

Example of a monochromatic palette, with the base color at the right and left ends of the top and bottom rows respectively:

Minimalism is a big craze at the minute. Think for a moment; how many pure white designs did you see online today?

There are good principles underneath this all of course, and most likely you already know them.

Minimalism = Less clutter = Less distractions = More time focusing on the important stuff.

But do all minimalist designs work with this principle in mind? Do you not feel that in some cases, a designer has just thrown a few divs together and dubbed his theme minimalist?

Blogging Bits is the blogging advice site run by Mohsin. What sets Blogging Bits apart from the hundreds of other meta blogs is the style he writes in.

You won’t find another site quite like it. If it suits your tastes, you may find his advice more interesting to read than some of the more dry alternatives.

The blog was redesigned not long ago, and his comments here have certainly earned him a review, so here goes.

Minimalist blog design is all the rage these days. In the pursuit of usability and a better user experience, designers everywhere are stripping out the needless elements of their sites. The result? Clean, fast loading sites that a user can actually use.

As with any design trend, there are two questions you should ask yourself.

1. Why should I adopt a minimalist design?
2. How can I adopt a minimalist design?

Photo by TonivS Every free template includes the author’s name near the content of each post. You would have to look hard to find one that didn’t. But why should you keep the name there?

Single and Multiple Authors

The purpose of giving the name so close to a post is to give credit to the person who wrote that post. This is important in multiple-author blogs where the author changes from post to post. Regular readers will be interested to know who is writing which posts, and the writers deserve credit for their work.

However, in a single-author blog, the author does not change from post to post. Regular readers do not need to be told your name over and over again as they know it already and can assume that the writer hasn’t changed.

Photo by *Micky* Categories are very easy to set up in a blog. So easy in fact, that we can often get carried away and end up with dozens of categories, all clogging up space in our sidebars. Rather than deleting these categories, we can remove the clutter by linking the categories into groups.

We then show only the group titles in the sidebar, and when a group title is clicked, the list of categories in that group expands beneath it. You can see a demo here.

This solution is very easy to implement, will remove the clutter for the vast majority of your users. For your users, and search engines, who have disabled Javascript, the complete list of categories will be shown as normal (And for the code junkies, it’s also XHTML valid!)