Smashing Magazine screenshot
Smashing Magazine did some interesting research on the top 100 blogs on Technorati: they looked at common typographical and page layout features and collated the information into a handy list.
In turn, I’ve designed an HTML/CSS template that incorporates the most popular features of big blogs. See it here:
The ideal blog according to Smashing Magazine’s research
Or
Download the zipped HTML and CSS files
The blogs share these features:
- large blogs require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns suffice) (58%);
- layouts are usually centered (94%),
- layouts usually have a fixed width (px-based) (92%),
- the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
- 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
- CSS-layouts are used (90%),
- the background is light, the body text is dark (98%),
- the most usual (not necessarily most user-friendly) line length lies between 80 and 100 characters,
- Verdana, Lucida Grande, Arial and Georgia are used for body text (90%),
- the font size of body text varies between 12 and 14px (78%),
- Arial and Georgia are used for headlines (52%),
- headlines have the font size between 17 and 25px.
Disclaimers:
- The information probably represents such factors as design trends, current conventions and the designers’ own tastes and quirks. There is no correlation between layout and typography and popularity: content is king.
- I think it’s a pretty poor design: body copy is too small and the layout is too fussy.
Anyway, feel free to leave a comment!