A Complete Guide On Blog Design (With 21 Examples)

blog_related_media

blog_topic

blog_related_activities

blog_niche

blog_related_tips

unique_blog_element

Imagine you’ve just hit publish on a new blog post. You worked hard on the content and are excited to share it. But you immediately feel disappointed when you open the post to see how it looks. The design is bland, and your images are too big. The comments section is barely visible, and a prominent ad interrupts the post’s flow. This is a relatable scenario for many bloggers. No one wants to spend time creating excellent blog content only to have a poorly designed blog ruin it. Blog design affects how readers perceive your content and can even impact SEO. This article will help you make sense of this vital element of blog content creation. You’ll learn about the different parts of blog design, why it matters, and how to improve it. We’ll also share several examples to inspire your blog.

If you’re looking for a simple way to organize your blog’s design and improve its visual appeal, check out Feather’s Notion to blog template. This easy-to-use tool will help you achieve your goals, such as learning about blog design and seeking examples.

What is Blog Design?

Blog design involves making a blog look better, work better, and be more accessible for people to use. This will increase people's interest in your blog, encourage them to read your blog posts, and convert more visitors into customers. It involves choosing the proper layout, fonts, colors, and visual elements to create a good-looking and easy-to-use environment.

With millions of blog posts published daily, standing out in the crowd requires more than high-quality content. Research shows that design can significantly impact a site's trustworthiness and credibility. A well-designed blog attracts visitors and keeps them engaged, increasing the likelihood of conversions and driving ROI.

Blog Design vs. Web Design: What’s the Difference?

The primary differences between a blog and a website design are:

Structure

Websites usually have a simpler and more organized structure, with many pages and sections that showcase a business's products or services.

In contrast, blogs are organized chronologically, focusing on regularly updated content with the latest posts appearing first. Their design is usually more straightforward, focusing on readability.

Purpose

Websites are built to sell, while blogs educate first before selling.

Blogs allow businesses to show their expertise and be thought leaders beyond LinkedIn. Sometimes, blogs are more editorial and can even serve as newsfeeds.

User Interaction

Websites focus on user transactions and moving through different parts.

Blogs encourage readers to interact with each other through comments and social sharing, creating a community around specific topics. Many modern websites incorporate blogs as a section, blending elements of both to improve engagement and provide fresh content.

White Label Blog Content

Blog Content Strategy

Blog Content Plan

How to Get Free Unique Content for Your Blog

Blog Structure

How Long Does It Take to Write a Blog Post?

How to Find Content for a Blog

Blog Content Calendar

What Makes a Good Blog Post?

Why Is Your Blog’s Design Important?

First Impressions Matter

When someone lands on your blog, they instantly judge whether it’s worth their time. A clean, professional design makes your site look trustworthy, while a messy or outdated layout might send people running. You want your readers to think, “Wow, this looks legit,” not “Is this from 2005?”

Readability = Retention

No one likes to strain their eyes to read tiny text or scroll through walls of unformatted content. Thoughtful blog design—using proper spacing, readable fonts, and engaging visuals—makes it easier for visitors to consume and enjoy your content. The easier it is to read, the longer they’ll stay.

Ever landed on a blog and felt lost? That’s a huge turnoff. A well-structured blog with intuitive menus, search bars, and clear categories helps users find exactly what they’re looking for without frustration. Visitors who can easily explore your content will likely stick around and return.

Branding & Recognition

Your blog is an extension of your brand. Everything should reflect your brand’s personality, from color schemes and typography to logos and design elements. A strong, cohesive design makes your blog more recognizable and memorable, helping build a loyal audience.

Better Design = More Shares & Conversions

People are more likely to share well-designed content. A polished and professional blog boosts credibility, making readers more comfortable subscribing to your newsletter, signing up for your course, or purchasing your products. It’s all about trust—and good design builds it.

Run your blog and newsletter with Feather today. Create a new account and send emails from Notion or go from Notion to blog in minutes!

21 Examples Of Great Blog Designs To Inspire You

1. Mockplus: A Design Blog That Just Gets It

Mockplus is a platform that provides design and collaboration tools for designers, developers, and product managers. It helps streamline the web and app design workflow from start to finish.

Mockplus's blog offers many:

UI/UX design insights

News

Tools

Events

Inspiration

The blog creates a visually pleasing, immersive, and informative user experience. Its features, among others, are the following:

Robust search capabilities

A simple navigation toolbar

Clean and clear post-presentation cards

Inspiring subscription and registration sections

Framer is a website that helps users build interactive prototypes for testing and gathering feedback. Like Mockplus's blog, Framer's blog also focuses on design and offers many articles to help users better understand its products.

Unlike many blogs that use a traditional top navigation bar, this Framer blog features a clean sidebar with icon buttons. This makes it easy for users to explore categories and options. The design mirrors the product interface navigation style, ensuring a consistent brand language.

3. Mark Manson: A Text-Only Blog Design That Gets It Right

Mark Manson’s blog is an excellent example of a text-only design. While visual elements like images, videos, and audio can undoubtedly capture attention in the digital age, they aren’t always necessary.

A text-only design can be highly impactful if you use different font sizes, typography, and styles to create a clear visual hierarchy. This blog is a great inspiration for creating a minimalist, text-focused blog design.

4. PostHog: A Beautifully Illustrated Blog Design

Incorporating engaging illustrations into UI/UX design has become trendy lately. This PostHog blog design follows that trend by featuring playful mascot illustrations to engage users. The clean, clear layout further enhances the overall user experience.

5. Gizmodo: A Classic Blog Design That Works

Gizmodo features a classic grid-style layout with:

A robust top navigation bar

Highlighted, centered posts

A clean, organized grid structure

The “Latest” section includes a timeline-like list, offering readers clear and well-organized blog post recommendations.

6. Smashing Magazine: A Blog With Great Informational Hierarchy

Smashing Magazine, a top UI/UX blog for designers, offers a wealth of professional design insights. The blog features powerful search capabilities, and the filter buttons on the top toolbar make navigating to the correct articles easy. The design of its advertisement section is worth checking out if you're looking for inspiration to create a high-converting blog.

7. Web Designer Depot: A Trendy Blog Design That Blends It All

Web Designer Depot shares insightful articles, tutorials, and resources for designers and developers. Its blog design incorporates nearly every major web design trend, including:

Dark mode

Bright colors and gradients

Smart interactions

Animations and more

Most importantly, it seamlessly blends these trends, creating an engaging and visually appealing experience that enhances user interaction and encourages exploration of its content.

8. Blog Page for Fitness Website: A Unique Approach to Blog Layout

This blog page concept for a fitness website features an unconventional layout. The designer uses different background color blocks across the landing page to distinguish each section. Each color represents a distinct visual section, creating a clear and compelling hierarchy. Isn't this a fantastic solution for such modern blog designs?

9. Travel Website Blog: A Visually Stunning Blog Design

As a travel website aiming to captivate users with stunning sceneries, this blog directly places a beautiful video on its landing page to engage visitors immediately. Below the video, articles showcasing:

Delicious foods

Breathtaking landscapes

Travel guides

It piques the audience’s interest, increasing the likelihood of inspiring them to plan a trip.

10. Blog Design Page: A Bold and Striking Layout

This blog design features a bold and visually striking layout, incorporating large hero images to highlight key blog posts. The photos immediately draw the reader’s attention, creating an immersive and engaging experience.

The clean, modern aesthetic ensures that content stands out while maintaining a balanced, user-friendly structure. The hero images effectively showcase the featured articles, setting a visually appealing tone for the rest of the blog.

11. Webflow: A Blog With a Unique Interface

Webflow's blog stands out with its modern interface, among other unique designs, featuring:

Unconventional navigation

Personalized typography

A mix of one-column and two-column layouts

12. Recraft: An Engaging and Colorful Blog

Recraft, an AI-driven platform for designers, captures users’ attention from the moment they enter the website. The vibrant color combinations, personalized fonts, uncommon images and layouts create a visual feast that immediately engages visitors.

13. Front: A Blog Design With Great Illustrations

Front, an AI-powered customer service platform, introduces the themes of its blog with illustrations. The intuitive navigation, robust search functionality, and clean, organized layouts make it easy for visitors to find the content they need quickly or are interested in.

14. Hex Tech: A Dark-Theme Blog That Gets It Right

Hex Tech is a brilliant dark-theme blog that is an excellent example of how to design fonts, grids, and colors to create a text-only blog landing page. Even without many images or audio elements, it offers a fresh, clean, and highly readable experience—truly embodying the “less is more” philosophy.

15. Intercom Blog: A Blog with a Newspaper-Style Layout

The Intercom Blog features a newspaper-style layout with a sticky sidebar that consolidates all the elements you might need while reading, including:

Categories

A search bar

Links to other parts of the website

Social media sharing options and more

The main content area on the right is designed with a clear, well-structured layout, offering rich information and visuals to ensure an enjoyable reading experience.

16. Pridmic Blog: A Modular Blog Design with Rich Categories

Pridmic Blog has two-tier navigation menus and a bento-style landing page. It features a variety of rich content categories, such as:

“Latest YouTube Content”

“Choose Your Tech Stack”

“Nail Your Workflow”

“Articles by Topic”

It makes it easy for readers to discover the most insightful content.

17. A Cup of Jo: A Blog With a Warm and Welcoming Design

Joanna Goddard, an experienced editor, started writing about her daily life as a hobby. Later, blogging turned out to be her full-time job. The blog is now run by a team of writers who provide a wide array of content – from food recipes to parenting tips.

What Can We Learn From This Blog

The website sports a warm-toned theme, with plenty of space between the site elements. In addition to the blog’s clever title, a play on the phrase “a cup of joe”, the title’s design is also unique. The letter O of the word “of” in “A Cup of Jo” is hollowed out to reveal a picture that changes depending on which blog page you’re on.

The homepage also features a list of the most popular blog posts of the month – an excellent way to promote the blog to new readers by providing them easy access to its best content.

18. Minimalism Life: A Blog Design That Embraces Simplicity

Created as a collaborative project, Minimalism Life is a lifestyle blog about minimalism—a life stripped down to the bare essentials. It is a community-driven blog that invites everyone to share their experiences on simple living by writing a blog post for the website.

What Can We Learn From This Blog

Even if you don’t subscribe to the Minimalism Life, you can follow this site’s clutter-free and straightforward approach to design your blog. The site uses a grayscale color scheme, with black or grey text on a white background – no colorful or overwhelming pictures or site elements. True to minimalism, the site provides only the essential elements.

The entire homepage acts as a navigation menu, providing links leading to other blog pages. The sidebar menu is on the left side of the screen, while links to social media profiles are on the right.

19. Girlboss: A Community-Driven Blog For Ambitious Women

Created by businesswoman Sophia Amoruso, Girlboss is a community-driven website that aims to help women redefine their success. Its primary target audience is ambitious women who want to advise rapidly in their:

Careers

Build networks

Self-improve

The Girlboss lifestyle blog provides various blog topics such as:

Beauty

Wellness

Work

Finance

What Can We Learn From This Blog

The Girlboss team ensures that the pictures accompanying their articles follow the same color scheme. All the pictures feature subjects set in front of a colorful background of soft, pastel colors. This way, all the photos come together as a visually attractive and cohesive unit.

20. Men’s Journal: A Well-Organized Lifestyle Blog for Men

The Men’s Journal website is the online version of the American magazine of the same name. The lifestyle blog, which is targeted towards men, features various topics such as:

Health and fitness

Male grooming and style

Outdoor recreation and travel

Cars and consumer electronics

What Can We Learn From This Blog

The website has a very organized navigation bar. For example, if a site visitor hovers over Gear on the navigation bar, various categories – such as Autos, Tech, and Fitness – will appear, complete with corresponding pictures.

Visitors can even click on the arrows on either side of the categories to view more categories. This feature allows users to find the desired content quickly and easily.

21. Treehugger: An Eco-Friendly Blog with Great Content Organization

Defining itself as a modern sustainability website, Treehugger is a blog created by eco-advocate and entrepreneur Graham Hill. It provides environmental news and articles exploring the intersections between:

The environment and gardening

Home life

Science

Design

Policy

Animals

The blog promotes an eco-friendly and sustainable lifestyle by providing reliable and accurate information.

What Can We Learn From This Blog

The top of the homepage showcases headlines of the latest articles. Scroll down, and you will see various blog post headlines organized neatly under all available categories, such as:

Environment

Home & Garden

Business & Policy

The entire page is designed for easy access to check the latest news and seek content of specific categories.

How to Write a Good Blog Post

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

How Often Should I Post on My Blog?

Personality Development Blog Writing

How to Write a Blog for Beginners

How to End a Blog Post

How to Write Your First Blog Post

How to Cite Sources in a Blog Post

Best Time to Publish a Blog Post

How to Repurpose Old Blog Posts

How Many Blog Posts Per Week?

How to Repurpose Blog Content for Social Media

6 Best Tips For Creating Your Blog Design

1. Prioritize Readability in Blog Design

When designing your blog, you want to ensure it is easy to read. After all, people visit blogs to read content; how easily they can read what you’ve written will determine how they interact with your blog.

The more readable your blog, the happier users will be, and the more they'll return to your site and share your content. Notice how our blog's font is slightly larger to aid readability.

The Role of Contrast and Color in Blog Readability

Here are some ways to improve your blog's readability.

Choosing a legible typeface. Use a font size between 15px and 22px for the blog post body. Headings and subheadings must stand out to make content scannable.

Set your line height to between 150% - 200% (will vary depending on the typography)

Apply the standard letter spacing for the body copy font.

Use white space to separate paragraphs, headings, and visual content (images & videos) so it's easy to scan a blog page.

Use space around the content to help the reader focus on the text.

Another aspect that impacts readability is the content width. For desktop viewports, keep your content centered with a width of 780px—900px, approximately one-third of the screen's width.

The content should be full-width on tablets and mobile devices. If your content is too broad, people must tilt their heads slightly to read and scan the blog page. This might seem insignificant, but it increases a user's cognitive load and makes reading content difficult. If people struggle to read your blog posts, they won't return.

2. Stick to a Consistent Design

Visual consistency is essential for UI blog design. A header or featured image poses a serious challenge for designers because of the different colors and contrasts that make blog feeds appear cluttered. Visual consistency also helps highlight blog design elements, like calls to action (CTAs).

For example, notice the prominent header UI element; sign up for Surfer call to action on the top right? We use the same button element and color for CTAs across our website so that users can always identify essential actions.

3. Create an Easy-to-Navigate Blog Layout

A well-structured blog layout is crucial for user experience, readability, and scalability. For a successful blog layout, remember four vital components:

A Header with logo

Primary navigation

The blog title is at the top of the page. The main content area is the blog post footer, which includes secondary navigation, social links, contact information, disclaimers, etc.

Optimizing Sidebars for Engagement Without Distraction

If you're wondering about sidebars, they can be challenging and present a few issues:

Distract users from content and your most important CTAs

Challenging to navigate on mobile

Reduce page performance and increase page load times

Sidebars can also help your readers navigate your content and provide additional author information, so you must decide for yourself. If you use a sidebar like us, ensure:

It helps to improve the user experience, like offering related content pages in a topic cluster.

Avoid external links, such as social media accounts. These direct people away from your website, reducing the possibility of converting them.

If you prefer a clean and uncluttered layout, consider placing your sidebar's content below the article. If someone wants to find you on social media or see more content, they'll scroll down to find it—they have to do this on mobile devices anyway.

4. Establish a Visual Hierarchy for Blog Layouts

Visual hierarchy reflects the importance of UI elements and content, guiding readers' eyes as they navigate a blog post.

Here are some ways to use visual hierarchy for designing blog layouts:

Typography: Use different sizes, weights, and styles to distinguish headings, sub-headings, and body text. Some blogs use a different typeface for headings and body text to accentuate the difference.

Color and contrast: Designers use color to draw users to specific content and create separation, especially for hyperlinks and call-to-action buttons.

Spacing and alignment: Spacing and white space are highly effective design techniques for creating separation and hierarchy. For example, it's standard practice to use whitespace around headings and between paragraphs to make content more scannable.

Media content: Images, video, and other media break up text and enhance visual appeal. Designers can use images strategically to support content and guide users through the article.

Emphasis: Bold, italics, and underlining help draw users to important text or instructions. For example, we use bold for these bullets to make it easier for you to identify the label.

5. Keep Reading Patterns in Mind for Scannability

Reading patterns are an advanced UX design technique for designing blog layouts. A 2009 eye-tracking study by the NN Group identified six web page reading patterns that you may observe by tracking the readers on your blog:

F-Pattern: The most common reading pattern for blog articles. Readers start by scanning left to right at the top of the page before they scroll down until a specific subheading or text catches their eye, at which point they scan left to right again. They may continue doing this until they find what they're looking for.

Spotted pattern: A user's eye scans the page for a specific word or content. This is why visual hierarchy is so important. It allows users to skim pages and complete tasks. For example, if you're writing a food blog, emphasizing the ingredients throughout the blog posts will help answer the question, “What do I do with the eggs again?”

Layer-cake pattern: Some users scan every heading and subheading to look for a specific topic. This scan and jump eye movement creates a layer-cake effect in the eye-tracking software. Using descriptive headings is essential when structuring blog layouts.

Commitment pattern: Some blog readers will invest (or commit) to reading an entire article. These people typically want to fully comprehend a topic, like directions, cooking instructions, or product documentation.

Zigzag pattern: A typical reading pattern for two-column layouts. This layout can cause readers to stumble, so avoid wrapping text around images to enhance your blog's readability.

6. Include Search Functionality

Designers often overlook the search for blogs, but many people use this feature to find additional content. Search increases engagement and keeps people on your blog site longer, which can signal positive indicators to Google and suggest your blog is higher in search engines. Search is also great for keyword research and learning which of your most popular blog posts are.

For example, if you notice your readers searching for “blog design,” you know it's time to write an article about how to design a blog.

Go From Notion to Blog With Ease Today with Feather

Feather is a blog and email newsletter service that combines the simplicity of Notion with the technical prowess of complex SEO tools. With Feather, you can write your blog posts in Notion and automatically publish them on your new Feather blog. You can customize your blog's design, collect emails, send newsletters, and more without coding or design skills.

Feather even lets you set up an SEO-friendly subfolder blog to publish at domain.com/blog instead of blog.domain.com. Getting started is easy: create an account, and you’ll have a blog up and running in minutes.

Why You Should Choose Feather for Your Business Blog

Feather makes it easy to collaborate on blog content with your entire team. Writing in Notion feels natural, and the Feather interface is simple and intuitive. You can invite your team members to contribute:

Blog ideas

Write posts

Edit content

Feather automatically transfers your Notion content to your blog when you’re ready to publish. You can even send an email newsletter directly from Notion to your subscribers when you publish a new blog post.