Every blog page looks the same

I spent 12 hours staring at my screen trying to figure out the layout for my notes (blog) page in my website. I looked at Pinterest, browsed a dozen websites, studied how everyone else structures a blog.

Title, hero image, text below. They are clean, standard, safe, and fine.

Something felt off but I couldn't name it, it felt like a template but it didn’t feels like me, which made me mildly frustrated.

Inspired by Standart

That night I gave up and was flipping through an issue of Standart, not looking for anything in particular, then I hit a spread and stopped. Left page: a pullquote on the top of the page, a photograph filling the bottom of the page. Right page: a column of body text occupying only half of the page, with plenty of breathing room on the side. Two physical pages sitting open, and my brain immediately saw a widescreen desktop layout.

That was it. That was the thing I'd been looking for all day.

I closed the magazine, opened Framer, and rebuilt the whole page in one sitting. It’s live now and I was so happy with it.

But what it also does is make everything look like everything else, because everyone is fishing in the same pool. The most original thing I made recently came from a coffee magazine at 10pm. I only found it because I finally closed the laptop.

I've always pulled references from the same medium I'm working in. Designing a website, look at websites. Designing a poster, look at posters. It's fast, it makes sense.

And then it hit me: I should seriously go touch some grass.