Filed under: Design
This is a kind of summary of what I found in Just Creative Design site, and I find it really true.
7 Most cliché stock images used in web design:
- Hand shake
- A group of business people
- Laptop, Keyboard or Mouse
- Rising finance graph
- Tall building
- Technical support person with headset
- Globe
Next time when you design something, be it a website or brochure to print, keep it in mind that we are full of this, enough is enough.
Some more,
7 most overused icons, shapes or symbols:
- Heart
- Wing
- Skull
- Light bulb
- Heraldry / Crest
- City skyline silhouette
- Arrow
7 most overused Techniques & Elements used in Graphic Design:
- Light rays / Sunray / Rising sun
- Silhouette
- Ink splatter
- Swirl, Flourish, Ornaments
- Flowing lines
- Funky circles
- Smoke texture
On Smashing Magazine, a survey to study the design of big blogs. This is the statistic:
- large blogs require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns suffice) (58%);
- layouts are usually centered (94%),
- layouts usually have a fixed width (px-based) (92%),
- the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
- 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
- CSS-layouts are used (90%),
- the background is light, the body text is dark (98%),
- the most usual (not necessarily most user-friendly) line length lies between 80 and 100 characters,
- Verdana, Lucida Grande, Arial and Georgia are used for body text (90%),
- the font size of body text varies between 12 and 14px (78%),
- Arial and Georgia are used for headlines (52%),
- headlines have the font size between 17 and 25px.
It’s time to change you blog design, or time to be unique? Your call.
ps.: I’m using someone’s else design, a free one from the web, since I don’t have freedom to customize the design (this is free wordpress blog). Blame him if my blog don’t go big, or blame wordpress for no freedom 
