Do you have a passion for photography? A great way to share your love is to start a blog. Unlike other types of sites, a photography-based blog doesn’t have to overdo it with its design. The photos can lead to the creation of the site for the most part. The layout, structure, and small accents make the rest of the invention. To help you get some ideas for the types of designs you can use for your site, here are 20 examples of well-designed photography blogs and magazines.
1. Creative Life
Creative Live is a media-heavy blog focusing on photography and videography. The site uses a two-column design with magazine-style layouts in the main content section. They vary the content boxes’ size to help certain posts stand out while keeping the look fresh. Overall, it’s very professionally designed.
2. Peta Pixel
Peta Pixel is a very well-designed, content-heavy photography blog. The site has an immaculate layout that condenses the content but presents it well due to the great use of negative space, high-quality thumbnails, and great iconography.
3. Retouchist
Retouch is a cool little blog focused on helping readers learn about retouching photos. The blog uses sticky top navigation menus with a hamburger drop-down menu for a minimalist look. Each blog post has beautiful examples of retouching paired with priceless advice for designers.
4. Ken Kaminesky
Ken Kaminesky’s blog starts with a beautiful load from a scrapbook page featuring photos of his travels. You are then given two choices: viewing either print of people and place in the slider. Either option leads to breathtaking images from this professional photographer.
5. National Geographic
There’s nothing fancy about National Geographic’s site, but you’re always in for a treat when you visit. They focus on simple navigation paired with high-quality photos featured on their main page. A two-column magazine-style layout is integrated throughout the main page to add an editorial style and remind you of the Magazine’s roots.
6. Archive Collective
Archive Collective has a clean design for its blog. They use multiple widgets for their two-column layout, but enough space is used between them to help tell them apart. They integrate beautiful featured posts into their regular form. Thumbnails are also used in the navigation menu to create a visual guide to the latest posts.
7. Noice Magazine
Noice Magazine does an interesting job of integrating their actual Magazine into their blog. They feature a beautiful cover on their layout and show great snapshots of photos from their Magazine. They even go as far as doing a video flip-through of the content inside. It’s an interesting case study of how design can be used to sell premium content.
8. Burn Magazine
Burn Magazine tries to compile each photo for a project and turn it into a story. They accomplish this by accomplishing the images in a unique but controlled layout. The pictures are organized in an atmospheric way and laid out to show all angles of the story.
9. FujiFeed
FujiFeed is the perfect example of letting the photos do the talking. This is the most minimally designed website you’ll ever see. The navigation is simple, and the two-row, one-column layout is as basic as possible. Only when you click on a post do you discover the editorial style formatting and beautiful photos accompanying it?
10. Yet Magazine
Yet Magazine uses a card-based layout for their blog. The design works well for many image-driven blogs because it’s simple but interesting. Yet, it has taken a page from Amazon’s playbook and decided to showcase preview real pages for each magazine issue. This approach works well and sells you on buying their latest issues.
11. PHRoom Magazine
Unlike most photo-based sites, PHRoom Magazines sets its entire site on a black background. This works surprisingly well with the white font, color-rich photos, and alternating layouts. Some cool features like the temporary static side navigation and Instagram post-integration add a nice touch to the already striking design.
12. Open Doors
Open Doors features work from many different artists. To help keep it interesting, they use a separate overlay for each artist and follow that with the artist’s work. They use this format to sell prints of the artists, which is a genius for arranging a blog/eCommerce layout.
13. Andy Mumford
Andy Mumford is a travel and landscape photographer. He uses a pattern featuring his best photos to overview each page section. This pattern is so simple and can be used by anyone, but it works brilliantly here because you’re presented with a beautiful photo that adds context to the content.
14. Palani Mohan
Palani Mohan features his photography with full-page backgrounds that auto-rotate. A few interesting things start happening when you click on one of the pages. Depending on where you hover, you’re presented with a photo of your mouse changing to a gallery or arrow icon. This pulls out the gallery, zooms in on the current picture, or moves to the previous/next image.
15. Colby Brown Photography
What’s so striking about Colby Brown’s site is how much thought he’s put into the layout. He has a great mix of featured photos, content, multimedia, and the latest posts on his main page. He also has four widgets on the site’s footer that share his bio, email newsletter, blog posts, and Instagram posts. Everything is so well organized and presented that it looks effortless.
16. World In My Lens
World In My Lens is a beautifully designed blog that uses parallax scrolling effects to add a wow factor to the presentation. The blog takes it to another level by presenting a world map where the photographer’s locations are plotted. Each point takes you to the photos page for that country or city.
17. Art Wolfe
Art Wolfe uses full-page photos to segment the different parts of his page. Many photographers have successfully used this style, and it works when the images are as dazzling as the ones you’ll find on his site. The layouts on his regular pages are elegant and help you dig deep into his work.
18. Nomadic Vision
Nomadic Vision is a minimalist site that presents its photos horizontally. When you scroll your mouse down to go through the site, you realize it only moves horizontally. While this is quite a weird feeling, the design decision does work and shows you many perspectives based on the page’s theme.
19. Pictory Mag
Pictory uses cool graphic effects to enhance the look and feel of their blog. They use transition effects, 3D effects, slide-out images, and bold mouseover effects to awe readers and create a better user experience.
20. Boston Globe
The Boston Globe has a blog that shares photos from everyday news stories. They do a brilliant job of using pictures and small captions to tell a story. This would be the holy grail if news stories had a visual storytelling guideline.
As you can see, you don’t need to be an expert web designer to start a blog related to photography. A strong layout, cool effects, and high-quality photos are all the ingredients for a great-looking site.
