I love thumbing through magazines–real magazines. I enjoy looking at each issue and seeing how they’ve arranged articles, how they use images, and how the type they’ve chosen interacts with the rest of the page.

We all know how blogs and blog posts are “supposed” to look. However, here are 2 examples of blogs that have an identity crisis (in a good way), and look more like magazines.

Dustin Curtis

dustincurtis_com---you-should-follow-me-on-twitterDustin Curtis spends his days crafting UI’s and UX’s.

His site makes fantastic use of type and magazine-style layouts. Each post is carefully laid out and makes you think twice about what a webpage is supposed to look.

The homepage is a table of contents for the site’s blog and the entire site looks like you should be able to pick it up and flip to the next page. Each blog posts includes an ‘issue’ number.

As far as I can tell, the site is simply coded in XHTML; giving it limitless possibilities (layout-wise).

Example Posts:

Your Should Follow Me on Twitter

How to Hack Your Brains Part 1: Sleep

How Niko Tinbergen Reverse Engineered the Seagull

Create the Filter

Jason Santa Maria

jasonsantamaria_com---hello-my-name-isJason is a graphic designer whose site and blog he’s decribed as a bit of an experiment.

Each blog post has its own unique layout, typography style and color scheme. Even the site brand and navigation changes color and style on some posts. Yet each post is built on a grid and still feels like it belongs on the site.

Typography is obvious a focus on this site and yet isn’t in your face. It’s balanced with images and the layout of the page.

What’s impressive is that Jason’s site is actually running on a CMS–ExpressionEngine. Each post has its own template that allows it to have a different layout than other posts.

Example Posts:

The Death Throes of Print?

Hello, My Name Is

What the World Needs

Pretty Sketchy

The Sum-Up

While these 2 sites are certainly pretty, we can learn more than that from them.

These blogs show us what’s possible, both with static XHTML and a CMS like ExpressionEngine.

We see that we’re not limited to the boring header-content-sidebar-footer layouts that we often associate with weblogs.

As my Dad always said, “let that be a lesson to you,” that you can teach an old blog new tricks.

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