Blog designing guide: my tips for making your blog look pleasing✨🦋 pt. 1

Being a blogger for a little over a year, I can say that I’ve come across a variety of blogs, and their designs. Every time I saw a new one, I wanted to change my blog because I never thought it was good enough as the other ones.

The last time I was redesigning, I didn’t know where to start, or what to change about my current design. I went to the reader but didn’t find any posts that could help.🙃

So I decided, why not write one myself? I put together a bunch of ideas, hacks, & tips for designing I wish I knew sooner😉

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☆my guide to blog designing☆

Finding your aesthetic/style✨

Remember that this is NOT necessary for every blog. I’m sharing this because deciding what I’m going to design beforehand helps me save time.😊

Before you start designing your blog, you could decide on your style, or your aesthetics. This is basically choosing what colors,fonts,images you’re going to use mostly on your blog. (Header,blog button,featured images etc)

For example: if you have a bookish blog, there are tons of related images on pinterest, canva or any other platform you use to design/find pictures. Here are some ideas:

• variations/shades of a color
• galaxies
• Stars
• minimalistic
• kawaii
• boho
• Neutrals
• music
• rainbows
• anime
• artsy
• Magic

I recommend going with something that matches your blogging voice! Etc: bright and colorful. My aesthetic is a mix of some of the ones mentioned above.

This also includes photography. if you use your own pictures, make sure they have good lighting, and are of good quality!

Color scheme🎨

Choosing a template for your featured images, & a color scheme of 4-6 colors makes your blog and your graphics look nice & put together.

On the WordPress customizer, there’s an option to choose one of the provided pallets or make one of your own with custom colors. 💕✨

Here are some pallets that blend well, for ✨inspiration ✨Minimalism is key~

Once you’ve chosen that, you could copy paste those colors’ codes onto a Canva template. For my blog, I used to have a pastel blue color pallet.

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Choosing a theme🖌

Now, there are hundreds of themes you can choose from. But finding the one that’s responsive, and has all the features you’re looking for can take a while. Let’s take a look at the features.💫

I made a post on theme recommendations, so if you’d like to read my reviews on themes I’ve used, click here.

• Post excerpts
• Featured image size
• Posts layout
• Sidebar/footer
• available fonts
• Menu and footer menu
• homepage/static layout
• Header image options
• Color options

you have to keep in mind that:

• Your theme CAN change
• Don’t think too much about trying a new theme, just go for it!
• Free themes have limitations
• Keep it simple.
• Avoid using super flashy colors (like neon pink)

Blogs with a white background are pleasing to look at. Make sure that the colors you’re using go well with each other! 💙

I think there are a lot of wonderful free WordPress themes, and if you don’t want to spend too much time working on themes, I recommend going with Dara because it’s the most easily customizable one.

Creating graphics💻

I only use Canva for creating my blog designs, and most bloggers I know do as well.

If you’re a beginner in graphic designing, I’d recommend going with a pre-made template, where you only have to change the text. Canva has templates for literally everything. Here are some common post topics that Canva has templates for:

• Lifestyle
• Health
• Pets
• Poetry
• Music
• Books
• Giveaways
• Colorful/ cute graphics
• Neutrals
• Aesthetic
• Pastel
• Abstract

(sponsor me please)

I used to design from scratch when I was new to blogging, I mostly use pre-made templates now and they are so much easier & time saving.👍 Make sure you’re using the free graphics that Canva provides, or there’ll be a big watermark on your images.🙃There are a LOT of beautiful free ones available, so make use of those!

However, if you don’t use Canva, here are some alternatives! I recommend checking out Living the Blogging Life for graphic designing tutorials in detail.

Fonts☀️

The next part of graphic designs, is the font. I used to have a base font that I used all over my blog, but after the lastest redesign, I don’t. 😃It’s good to choose just 1-3 fonts and stick to them. Here are some questions to ask yourself while deciding on a font;

• Is this font easy to read, and not too swirly?
• Does this font fit with my blog?
• Would this work well with my other fonts?
• Do I see myself using this often?

Some font combos I recommend are:

• A cursive font + Sans Serif
• Display font + handwritten
• Vintage font + handwritten
• Cursive + Elegant
• Modern + Calligraphy
• Script + Sans Serif

All of these are font categories available in Canva!🧡 Here’s a font board from the LTBL design team:

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Format🦋

Remember to experiment with different formats, instead of using the same old one for every single blog posts. I used to write in huge chunks of words, without punctuation, gaps, or images.😣 That’s just not fun to read. Instead, do this:

Why do I sound like a grammarly ad

• Use proper punctuation
• Leave gaps between paragraphs
• Use images to break up text
• Align texts
• Align your images
• Use a different text size for subheadings and important points
• make sure your images are showing up
• Use colors, not that are hard to see, but pleasing to the viewer

I’ll be talking about formatting your blog pages in the second part, for now: how do you format posts?

• Use different blocks. Like the list, heading, separator.
• Align paragraphs. Instead of everything being aligned on the right side, adjust some text to be on the opposite side, or justify the text so it’s in the center.
• Align images to go on the side of your text, above, or below it.It takes a while but it’s worth it when you’re done with the post.
• Use italic and bold text.
• Preview your post to make sure it’s readable with the formatting

View the post on both desktop and mobile devices to make sure its compatible on both!

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☆In conclusion☆

• Find your aesthetic/style✨
• Stick with a color scheme of 4-6 colors
• Choose a theme
• Create Graphics
• Decide on fonts
• Format

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Remember that you don’t need to have a perfect blog design. It’s fine if you don’t use any graphics at all, or have a simple theme. what matters is your writing, and I wrote this post because design is the next big element in a blog.

This is only the first part, the second part will be posted in the next few months😄

Thank you so much for reading. I spent a lot of time working on this post, so I’d really appreciate it if you could reblog/share this!💛✨