Introduction

As I dove deep into blog creation, I had some discoveries and insights that I want to share. Fortunately, they may be meaningful for your own blog. Of course, this is all boring talk if you're not really interested in the topic.

Pantsu Prophet's Influences

First, I need to clarify that I created my own blog by observing the flaws in PantsuProphet's blog. I love his blog, but it has some issues that I wanted to avoid.

His blog uses an aesthetic font — I believe it's Courier New, or at least some version of Courier. The font itself is nice, it feels like a terminal or movie script font. However, the way it was implemented wasn’t ideal. The font size and weight are too large, and the number of characters per line makes his articles tiring to read.

Not to mention responsiveness, his blog isn’t responsive at all. I don’t consider that entirely bad, because I used to share the philosophy that you should browse the internet on a computer, and that smartphones are a waste of time if you use them for active internet browsing. However, when it comes to reading articles, it’s actually much more pleasant to read them on a smartphone than on a computer, especially if you have a good device with a high-quality screen.

Attempt Typography!

If you want to learn practical typography methods, I recommend this book:

It’s free and teaches you everything you need to know to become a good typographer. If you want to write articles, you MUST study typography.

But I can give you some advice right now, just enough to get started:

• 1rem or 1.5rem (depending on your resolution and the font’s natural size) is ideal for body text. Try using clamp() to make it responsive.
• 68 characters per line is considered ideal. If the line is too short, it becomes tiring to constantly move your eyes to the next line. If it’s too long, you may lose track of where the next line begins. You can control line length using the ch unit.
• I can’t give you an exact value for margin-inline, you’ll need to experiment. I’m currently using 1rem as my margin-inline.
• Font choice matters. You need to balance aesthetics and usability.

There are many more good practices, but these are the most important ones in my opinion. You can build a decent blog using only these principles.

There are also best practices that I’m not currently following. You’re probably in the default mode right now (which prioritizes aesthetics over utility), so the bright text effects might be making reading slightly tiring. I plan to create a “reading mode” focused purely on readability, where I’ll remove all visual effects.

I’m just not implementing it right now because editing the template — or creating a new one from scratch — is quite time-consuming :q

This is my actual font configuration, this is what works for me. The margin is in another component, but you already have an idea.

	
	.content {
		font-family: 'EB Garamond';
		margin-inline: 1rem;
		font-size: var(--font-400);
		max-width: 68ch;
		line-height: 1.5;
		font-weight: 400;
	}

Other Regards

There’s this idea that if you want to create a completely responsive and functional website, you have to forget aesthetics. I disagree with that — you just need a balance between the two.

When you're building your blog, prioritize typography above all, because by doing that you're already covering a great portion of the responsive and functional side. Then you can focus on the aesthetic layer. Creating blogs is art — so go ahead and make art!

I believe you already have more than enough to create something new.

Just don’t make hauntological stuff — this is one of my biggest philosophies, and I plan to write an article about it. Don’t make things repetitive. Don’t try to recreate a Windows 95 aesthetic. Create something new. We want to meet the future, not be stuck in the past.

Last but Not Least

Oh, I wasn’t going to add this section, but here it goes:

DON'T PUT SO MANY SECTIONS IN YOUR BLOG!!!

It becomes hard to follow when you have sections for: pictures, favorite movies, writings, articles, anime reviews, daily thoughts, and so on...

Keep it minimalist, because people are not soooo interested in you. Talk about the right things. Talk about what is meaningful to you. Don’t try to make it big.