One of the reasons I'm on Blogger rather than Wordpress is that I love the back end. It's high-contrast and the writing area for posts is big and there are fewer buttons.
I like simple. I like clean. For this blog, I don't need the advanced design and media that come with Wordpress, because all I'm doing is blogging. Wordpress is where I work, Blogger is where I play.
I didn't leave everything completely default, though. I have pages - all there visible at the top - because I do things and you can give me money for them. In my sidebar I have a short bio and a pic because it tells you who you are reading, and a list of links to find me on those other sites that I regularly use, and a place to subscribe by email or publicly recommend my blog. I have my archives, neatly in drop-downs, so that you can navigate. I have a cloud of tags, to give you another way to navigate and also because it amuses me greatly that the tag 'Seneca Crane's beard' has more than one post attached to it.
I have a blogroll of other sites to check out, because some of my friends and family also have internet presences and that's neat. I also have the World Community Grid square there, because that's a neat project that more people should be involved in.
Most of the blog is black and white, because that's easy to read, and I like easy to read and simple. The background is yellow because I wanted some colour, and yellow is cheerful. I also picked yellow because I looked up some stuff on colour-blindness and it looks reasonably similar no matter what kind of colour-blindness one has. That was a thought, because my dad is colour-blind and I'm ridiculously sentimental.
Sometimes design is about more than just branding, or other factors, like wanting it no-fuss, will inform branding and design decisions. For me, it was important that these decisions be made deliberately, because I didn't want to put something together only to change it later when I thought of something better.
