Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs

Content-analytic methods are applied to a random sample of weblogs as a means of exploring current visual trends within the blogosphere and suggest that adult males are most likely, for example, to use unique templates, with teenage females ranking second in their use of customized templates.

Abstract

Weblogs (blogs) have been heralded as a new space for collaborative creativity, a medium for breaking free of constraints of previous forms and allowing authors greater access to flexible publishing methods. This generalization seems extreme: genre studies done by Crowston and Williams (2000) and Shepherd and Watters (1998) lend credence to notion that weblogs are evolutionary descendents of other visual media, such as newspapers and pamphlets. Previous work on weblogs has largely focused on nature of weblogs as textual artifacts. Authors such as Dave Winer (2001), Meg Hourihan (2002), and Rebecca Blood (2000; 2002) have focused on voice, essayistic style, community, and a pantheon of other concepts drawn from preexisting rhetorical, journalistic, sociological, and linguistic frameworks. This focus, while admirably productive, does not fully map potential landscape of research. In particular, such textual foci slight visual factors that may contribute almost as much to weblogs as particular textual practices (c.f. voice) of individual authors. To our knowledge, very little work has been done to date that examines either visual elements of weblogs or relationship between visual and textual elements of those same sites. The availability of visual design elements division of screen into columns, image use, color and typeface choice (Hagerty, 1996) along with placement of elements on page permitting meaning to be suspended in visual (Lacan, 1998), allows for non-textual self-expression. Visual design inhabits the field of vision, which is much wider arena than a sphere for circulation of images or question regarding nature of representation (Rogoff, 1998, p. 31). An informal survey of weblogs reveals that new users of medium have adopted fewer than their forbears: as notions of what constitutes a weblog concretize, creative use of visual and hypertextual features seems to be in decline. Design innovations breaking out of a certain acceptable visual style are increasingly rare, while weblogs that conform to expectations three-column, smaller text down side, prominent header and footer, some links and sparse image use (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2004)continue to be created. Detailed analysis suggests that adult males are most likely, for example, to use unique templates, with teenage females ranking second in their use of customized templates. New weblogs often appear simpler than older weblogs. In this study, we apply content-analytic methods (Bauer, 2000) to a random sample of weblogs as a means of exploring current visual trends within blogosphere. Detailed coding for presence of common structural, visual features allows correlation of those trends with demographics of content producers. back to top