I was just reading a post by Taughnee Stone over at EndeavorCreative.com (coincidentally, she’s in Anchorage too) that asks which blog layout is best, a conversation that is of interest to me at the moment, since one of my goals this summer is to redesign Fluid Imagination from the ground up.

Taughnee writes:

To answer which is better: two columns or three, fixed width or fluid - a designer knows that “it depends.” The answer is only determined after a great deal of information gathering and research—the design decisions that follow have purpose

It’s not just designers who know that. I think there are many of us out here in the blogosphere who understand that our designs, coming–as most of them do–from templates, are less than satisfactory to our purpose.

Peter Flaschner, another designer, rants on this topic:

This gets at the heart of my issue with blog design: it isn’t design at all. It’s decoration. Blog design as its practiced by many (including some designers) does nothing to enhance my user experience or to positively enforce the brand. “Real” design flows from the content. It supports and augments it through non-verbal connotations and subconscious cues. It leads the user’s eye where you want it to be led. It is not a default setting.

Unfortunately, he goes on to say:

If you’re writing a personal blog, by all means, go nuts with kubrick or your blogger/typepad templates. But if you’re writing a business blog, please, please make an effort to give your blog a unique, effective, well designed look. You’re going to putting a lot of effort into your site. You want your site to look at least as good as the content you’ll be putting into it.

As if people who write personal blogs have no interest in the design of their site!

There are two topics that spring from Taughnee’s and Peter’s articles. One is a request, and the other is a bit of a philosophical investigation into blog design in general. The latter also ties into my yet-to-be-released, blogosphere-based model of morality and HobbyPrincess’ idea of “Own Logo.”

The request
The number one reason why blogs are increasing at a rate of something like 100,000 a day, according to Naked Conversations, is because these things are so damn easy to create and maintain. With services like Blogger and Typepad, bloggers need next-to-nothing in the way of technical experience to share their thoughts, words, photos, experiences, etc. with the world. All it takes is a slight level of motivation, a willingness to sit down for a few minutes (or hours) a day and contribute something to the conversation that is (should be?) the blogosphere.

On the other hand, the back end of blogging, which is where all the design takes place, is nothing but code. If you want to design your own blog templates, you have to have some knowledge of (I think) XML or MovableType. I’ve tried to design my own templates using Typepad’s advanced template creator, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And I’m a guy that taught myself how to create an Access database from scratch, a database that is still being used by an advertising agency with over $8 million in annual billings.

When you combine the non-technical people that make up the blogosphere with the overly-technical design process, you get what we have now: arguments about “the right” number of blog columns.

There’s gotta be a better way.

What is needed is an amateur-level blog design application, something that works in a drag-and-drop kind of way, where the code is accessible but not necessary, like all those WYSIWYG HTML editors out there. We need an Adobe or Macromedia kind of product, something not quite as extensive as Dreamweaver but not as clunky as Adobe’s old consumer level HTML editor, PageMill.

Now, it may already be out there, but if it is, I haven’t seen it. A search over on VersionTracker (both under Mac OS X and Windows) for “blog design” doesn’t come back with anything that approaches what I’m talking about here. Anyone heard of anything like this (hopefully for Mac)?

With 100,000 people creating new blogs every day, you gotta think there is a market for this kind of product. Which leads me to…

The philosophical investigation
The ridiculous growth of the blogosphere suggests that people want to participate. They are sick of being the passive recipient of the media. The entire Apple consumer-application strategy seems based on the idea that we all want to creators. Applications such iMovie, iPhoto, Pages, GarageBand, Final Cut Express, and Logic Express (not to mention Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Premier Elements) are all based on the idea that regular people like you and me have something unique to bring to the table.

Now, let’s bring in what HobbyPrincess has to say about the “Own Logo” phenomenon:

An essential aspect…is the branding of one’s own creations. Many of the people who have started to make their own designs (including me and my friends) want to tag their creations with their own symbol. The symbol can be their initials, a nickname, or any other sign that they want to adopt as their own brand

If we combine this desire to brand one’s own creations, the desire to create in general, and the desire to contribute to the blogosphere, you get the immense importance of blog design.

Blogs are identities. More than just an online journal, for many people, they become the only method we have for interacting with a majority of the world. Sure, I have friends who I go to bars with, who I talk to on the phone, who I party with, etc., but there is also a larger number of people with whom I’ve never interacted except via this blog. We’ve never met. All they know of me is what they find here. For them, I AM THIS BLOG.

If wording it quite that drastically makes you nervous, we can go about it another way. Identities are brands. And like brands, we do not have absolute control of them. I think I am a nice, honest, and interesting person. But I know there are people out there who think the complete opposite. Who is to say which of us is right? Do I have the privilege of being right just because I’m with me all the time, or does that very fact make me too emotionally involved to make any valid judgement?

For many people, the Golden Arches are a symbol of American Imperialism. For others, it symbolizes childhood memories of fun birthday parties. The same could be said for the symbols “Kyle” and “Callahan.” Those symbols bring up different thoughts for different people. And no one, including me, has access to the “true” meaning of those words.

Things aren’t any different on the blogosphere. But on the blogosphere, there is a better chance to…I don’t want to say, “control,” but rather, influence the way other people perceive us. We can edit our words in ways we can’t in conversation. We can link to the people who have inspired our ideas, giving other people a better understanding of where we are coming from (the morality part starts to come in when those people interact with us in turn, clarifying their own thoughts in light of where have taken them). And we can link to our previous posts to show a more complete development of a particular thought. Furthermore, we can use the blog title to reframe perceptions, moving away from our given names to the names we have chosen for the newest version of our selves. Still further, we can create different blogs to represent different versions of our selves.

Now, with all of this being the backdrop, it seems easy to see why blog creators need a tool to create the design of their blog from scratch. Using a template designed by someone else seems akin to wearing a mask of someone else’s face. If blogs are to be a virtual representation of our selves, we need to be able to make ourselves up in the way we want.

Would someone more talented than me please get to work? Thanks.