Today I thoroughly criticised weblog design on Swhack, writing up summaries of all of the blogs on Aaron Swartz's blogroll, and discussing the features that make good (and bad) blog designs.
The exercise was meant to be a personal thing for my own instruction, but a few people have become interested in the frankness of my criticisms already—and I've also been corrected in some notable areas. For example, Tantek pointed me to his post on why his style is like it is, which is a very interesting idea (he's redesigning popular styles in CSS).
I decided that oblomovka, daringfireball, and Mark Bernstein are my favourite designs. They all share a sense of balance between the colours and the typography and the layout that most neglect; they each have a distinctive feel to them that sets them apart from the others, and makes them memorable and easy to recognize. The other criteria that I decided are of most utility to designers are consistency and tone: if you use garish colours, or ones that don't match, then they'll be distracting. What baffles me is that this is obvious advice, and yet barely anyone seems to follow it.
I also observed the general trend that the bloggers that were more well known to me also tended to have better designs: though there were some surprising exceptions to that rule.
Overall, I started the study because I'm interested in equilibrious, non-intrusive and yet interesting, designs, and found much less than I thought I would. But design is subjective, and personal: for the projects that I'm doing, I'm looking for something as distinctive as possible, and that's one of those things that is very hard to learn.