Design have no boundaries. You can design anything from this world and beyond. Its all up to your imagination. Of recent, few blogs have used the path of going minimalistic and achieve great results. They have used the exact opposite of conventional design, where the motive is to pack as many contents as possible in a given space.
Here are few tips you can use on your Minimalistic Blog to make it stand out and seek attention:
- Remember to Keep it Simple. Incase of minimalistic design, remember that LESS is always better. But do not compromise with what you want to display.
- Simple Header Image with preferably 2 column layout. Two column layout goes well with minimalistic designs. 3 Column layout looks cluttered and Bloggers tend to feed too many contents in them.
- Strictly avoid Magazine Style layout. Magazine style layout are symbolized with Showing many posts and pages in the front page with excerpts and link to read the Entire Story. These do not go well with minimalistic design in general. (This is not a hard and fast rule and there are few exceptions)
- Front page should show the full post rather than excerpts. If your average post length is very long, then you can use excerpts in the front page. Make sure you disclose a sizable section of your post in the excerpts. Use the <!—more—> Quick tag.
- Avoid displaying category, tags, author near the Post Title. They make it look cluttered. However displaying Date is OK as it is very important aspect of Blogging.
- If necessary, display category, tags and author details near the end of the Post. Better idea would be to use small font for displaying them as most people are not interested in them. It just provide an additional way of navigating the Blog. 50% Font size of the Body Text seems to be a good choice.
- Use Contrasting Color for Post Background and Blog Background. This will make it stand out. However here contrasting does not mean opposite. So don’t go all Black and White. Contrasting should be such that a mixture of Dark and Light colors so that they make the elements stand out but do not stress the eyes.
- Experiment with Large Post Title. Large Post Titles are a great way to grab attention to a particular post. However note that the Title should not be large enough that all headings spill to second and third line. Also it should be smaller than your Blog Title.
- Use proper Line Spacing. Minimalistic blogs tend to put more paragraph contents in teh front page of the Blog. It is a good idea to use a higher line spacing to make it more easy on the eyes. 150% seems to be a good choice here.
- Avoid array of Social Bookmarking Icons. If needed use a service like Share It or Add to Any at the end of the post.
- Avoid other oddly placed widgets. Especially Header and Footer Widgets.
- Avoid displaying Ads which takes up too much Space. Also these Ads break the design flow. See if In-Text Ads works best for your model and stick too them.
