There’s nothing like one-of-a-kind blog design to put a unique stamp on your own brand. While there are plenty of nifty-looking templates on offer by popular blog hosting sites such as WordPress, a lot of bloggers still seek personalized designs to make their brands stand out from the rest.
99designers have been tapping into that market, delivering creative blog designs in tons of different styles. Every one of these designs might not all appeal to all audiences, but each is tailored to perfectly fit the blogger in question — whether it be travel writer, media personality, culinary commentator, or something else altogether. Here are some of the diverse creations that have been offered up on 99designs lately:
1. masofon
Typography and color dominate in this WordPress template redesign for the annual music festival Silicon Valley Rocks! The posts are organized simply, letting the event’s branding take center stage. Rock on!
2. opdesign
Opdesign kept it a bit conservative and professional for this Stanford university student organization, keeping it in-line with the school’s branding while organizing all of the relevant information into interactive sliding bars.
3. ivdsgn
UC Irvine uses unconventional grid-style interface often popular in print magazines to target an inventive and design-friendly demographic. Grids are every designer’s friend, read more about them here.
4. Thinking Hats
To keep up with the theme of travel, the client let designers know that they were drawn towards the look of passports and maps. Thinking Hats took this suggestion to heart, incorporating vintage travel imagery into the header bar and using a grungy map-like texture to bring the whole site together. Bravo!
5. Djaja
While the layout of this inspirational blog for a printing company is kept simple to maintain the professional image of the company, there are a couple of smaller creative details to give more personality to the blog — like the whimsical illustration of the lightbulb in the header bar.
6. mkels
A community blog for dedicated fans of the game Diablo that is kept relevant and over-the-top in a good way with generous use of popular game characters in the background and the top header bar.
7. j u s t e
J u s t e ‘s take on the gaming blog goes a full 180 degrees from our previous example, focusing on looking more professional rather than fan-fun based. Utilizing multiple columns, this style maximizes the space so it gives the illusion that the blog has more content than viewers could ever wish for!
8. digitfox
The blog theme here keeps with the main demographics of busy moms with young kids, but steers well from an overly feminine look with frills or pink cupcakes. Instead, digitfox adopted a retro style (as requested by the author) by using details like the striped header bar and hand-drawn icons.
9. Simon Clavey
Designer Simon used a minimalistic newspaper-themed look to ensure that the content for this marketing blog had room to speak for itself. He achieved this by focusing on limiting his color palette, choosing a classic font face and putting important widgets like the featured story and subscription service up top.
10. Lunaris247
For their luxury tour business, Image Morocco invited designers to evoke the 1920s to display the Golden Age of traveling and aesthetics commonly associated with old-school Moroccan adventures. Lunaris247 delivered, with an elegant design that definitely calls to mind another era.
11. Melwyn2010
This designer really captured the blogger’s personality by using her provided imagery and then pairing it with complementary colors in a crafty color-blocking scheme. It boosts the home-made feel by using a painted-on effect for the hero image as well as Polaroid frames for the author’s head-shots.
