
Blog Post Design - HOW TO CREATE EPIC BLOG POSTS
Blog post design. Long-form content doesn’t need to be boring. Using visual elements will help you complement your content in a way that engages your reader. Providing a more immersive experience. I see a blog post as a great investment of your time. Social posts seem to last for hours or even minutes before losing audience interest. However, a post is for the long term. If you do a random google search chances are that you may come upon a top-ranking post that was written years ago! So in my mind spending a good amount of time to make sure your post looks the best and most interesting it can be is well worth it.
People have been writing and recording long-form content since the internet was invented. Sometimes it falls out of fashion, but it’s back and judging by its online presence and level of engagement it cannot be ignored. After seeing some great examples of long-form content, the resounding conclusion should be:
captivating SEO optimised content + stunning visuals = great long-form post.
The content of a blog post will always be the most important part of a blog. However, as we all know reading a blog that can be sometimes thousands of words long can be challenging. Especially nowadays when people´s attention span has been severely reduced by social media. They expect all relevant information in one very short “post”. So the challenge to make a truly captivating long-form post is to break it up into more easily digestible chunks. That is where an effective blog post design comes in.
Learn to make beautiful, engaging and fun blogs

Visuals are not merely for decoration, they are a fundamental part of blog post design. They are part of the story being told. Whether in writing, or speaking, they are crucial to helping readers and listeners understand what is being said.
You want your user to keep wanting to know more. Teasing the audience with an open-ended piece of information or a question that gets their minds buzzing.
As great as your writing may be, you still need some eye candy.
Make it easy to navigate. You don’t want a wall of text. Be sure to include headings, anchor links, and a table of contents. By simply adding some visual elements, such as photos, videos, infographics, and other media, the post will become a whole lot more appealing.
How to Approach Designing your Epic Post Layout
You should only approach your blog post design after your second draft, that’s our suggestion. Why is that you may ask? Firstly you have to have the content of the blog already written or at least in a late draft stage.
Your goal when writing an article is to get people to read your content, and when they do, to keep them reading. You’ll want to know which parts of your article are the least interesting, but still must be included in your piece. These are the areas that will benefit from a visual element, to reinterest your readers and have them continue reading.
We feel that every visual element should have a reason to be there, just like the written content.
Make it easy to navigate. You don’t want a wall of text. Be sure to include headings, anchor links, and a table of contents. By simply adding some visual elements, such as photos, videos, infographics, and other media, the post will become a whole lot more appealing.
- Will it draw interest?
- Will it keep the reader engaged?
- Does it add to the user experience?
- Does it make the information more clear?
The Visual Assets for your blog post design
Because we’re going to be building our blog post, we need to maintain a certain level of consistency and familiarity across all of our posts. We can do that by creating page templates and widgets that we can reuse across our pages. We can achieve that by creating global widgets that will be available in all of our blogs.
Spacing
We’ll be discussing various ways to use space throughout this post. It’s integral to any type of design and especially important for visual assets. You need to be aware of it if you want to know how to use space effectively.
Design your space, around and in between blocks of text, paragraphs, and headings. You can do this as an initial sketch on paper, but it’s probably easiest to paste your bare text (without any formatting) onto your page. Then use the Text Editor and Heading widgets to divide and space sections of text.
Space can also be used very effectively to highlight important points. The user will be immediately drawn to anything that has an abnormal amount of space around it. Use space wisely and cleverly.
Images and Collages

This is an obvious point, but it’s still worth mentioning. We love images.
In this age of ‘content is king’, we tend to spend more time looking at images than reading words. I’m guilty of doing this too. Let me save you the embarrassment of skipping ahead to look at the illustrations and images in a book or article before coming back to the beginning and reading it through. We all do it.
We know that different types of words and images generate different types of engagement. If we use this knowledge we can place images and text so that they flirt with the need for images.
Some prefer to have an image at the top of the text, above the heading, or in the middle of the introduction paragraph. The design is up to you. You know your material and audience.
Consider using a collage as your opening image. Perhaps your collage will be made up of images that will be used in the article later. Perhaps they are examples of what can be done with a particular technique or tool you’ll be discussing. The goal here is to whet the appetite of the reader and get them thinking about what you’re talking about.
Videos, Motion effects, GIFs in Blog Posts
For many content creators, videos and motion effect animations are considered to be the ‘big guns’. They create an incredible level of engagement and are a very powerful way of communicating with your audience.
Place the visual elements wherever works best for your post. Some posts will always have a video at the top of the post. Others in the middle. You could use it as a background.
You could consider using short videos as a way to enhance the message. Similar to embedding a GIF image (which is another great way to break up written matter). However, video offers better quality and more detail than a GIF.
It’s important to store your videos on your hosting platform. Using a different platform could result in a non-optimized look and feel for your posts. For example, many commercial video platforms don’t support looping.
Graphs, Tables, Infographics

Visual data, such as graphs and tables, adds another dimension to the text. In addition to breaking up the text and making it more engaging. Readers now have a break from constantly reading from left to right, now they have a chance to read from top to bottom. They also enjoy that moment when they try to figure out the structure of the graph, like solving a puzzle.
Blocks of Color As a Way of Differentiating Your Posts
Background colors will add life to your article. Even if they’re not a part of the content itself, they’ll help it stand out and give it life. It may be that they’re just there to keep your text from being boring, but they can be a major factor in helping your article appear more interesting to readers.
We can also use them to create headlines that grab readers’ attention and make it easy for them to read the text. For example, Use a color box to highlight the most important information.
Hot Spots
A relatively new addition but fantastic in adding interest and value to a blog post. It´s also great because it encourages the user to interact with the post which is unusual and will heighten the interest.
Here as an example, I have used the humble avocado, for no other reason than I like them and I also happen to have an avocado tree. Let´s make it interactive and find out some interesting facts about them.

The Avocado were once a luxury food item that only royalty had access to.
Avocados are the Aztec symbol of love and fertility
Avocados can stay on the tree for as long as eighteen months and they will not ripen until removed from the branch
A single avocado tree can produce up to 500 avocados per year. (Now that’s a lot of avocados.)
The quote
Quotes can be very useful for breaking up the wall of text. Also, it will attract attention to an important piece of information. Of course, use them wisely to accentuate a point or an argument in your post.
Design is the intermediary between information and understanding
Hans Hoffman, artist and teacher
Use your imagination and have fun
Well, we could go on and elaborate on even more visual assets that could be used. But, if you’ve read this far, you should be already getting the idea. It’s down to your unique ability and imagination to take what we’ve shown you here and create an epic post that is gripping, but visually captivating.