Blogs that look like mine

So I think it's about time I learned how to design an original blog template. Anybody who looks at many blogs has probably seen at least a few dozen that look like mine (minus the thumb, which I managed to modify).

This is especially true since my blog was featured a couple weeks ago on Designers Who Blog, and I still have many visitors who come from there. I probably don't have too much credibility with the design community when my blog design is just a stock Blogger template— albeit a pretty well designed one.

It's very much like stock photography. I try to discourage my own print design clients from using royalty-free stock art for just this reason. The image that they cheap out on to represent their happy and satisfied customers, could easily end up in a competitor's ad to represent their happy and satisfied customers. Or worse yet, end up in a porn site or some other embarrassing place.

On that note, as I was searching for an entertaining example to use as the image for this post, it suddenly became much funnier. My first random hit on a site in Blogger that looked like mine was the above hard-core gay porn blog.

My only excuse, fellow designers, is that as a print designer, my web design skills are limited. I know it's probably not rocket science, but I just don't technically know where to begin to design my own template yet. I'll figure it out someday, but blogging alone is very much distracting me from my paying work, so you'll just have to bear with this cheap stock template for a while longer.