The Blog Design Madness competition is now officially underway! There are 64 blogs that have been chosen, and the participants are all listed in this post. Because each competition requires a separate poll, I decided to break up the first round into 2 parts. There are 16 matchups in this post involving 32 outstanding blog designs, and the second half of round one will come in a few days (but I did list the other 32 participants at the end of this post for those of you who are curious).
Each matchup includes a poll, links and a screenshot of both blogs. Please vote for as many of the matchups as possible (if you’re reading in an RSS reader or in email, you’ll have to click through to the post to be able to vote, as you’ll see below). Voting will be open for 24 hours (until 9:00 PM Tuesday, Eastern time - US).
Thank you to everyone who voiced their opinion over the past few days by nominating blogs for the competition. I apologize to the last few commentors because I set the participants yesterday before your comments came in.
I initially said I would seed the competitors, but I quickly realized that was not feasible. So, I separated a few of the “favorites” and tried to balance them out so they could meet up against each other as late as possible, but for the most part the matchups are fairly random. If you’re interested in seeing a bracket, I created a makeshift Excel sheet that will be updated as the tournament goes.
Just a reminder, the winners from each round will move on to face each other. Enough talk, let’s get to the voting.
Note: This competition ended a while ago and the polls have been removed.
GROUP 1
Vocino.com
Pro Blog Design
9513
Grand Sierra Magazine
The Big Noob
Reflections
David Airey
GROUP 2ProBlogger
Artico
Cult Foo
Robert Beerworth
Laura Alter
Rob Goodlatte
Josh Spear
PSDTuts
The rest of the participants will get in on the action in a few days. These blogs will finish out the second half of round one (images will be included when the voting occurs).
- Web Designer Wall
- Instigator Blog
- Vectips
- BittBox
- I Heart Luxe
- BienBienBien
- Carsonified
- Bill English
- Woork
- TJ Mapes
- Monofactor
- Copyblogger
- Kineda
- RSS Pieces
- Put Things Off
- sr28
- Veerle’s Blog
- Art Style Online
- Larissa Meek
- PixelResort
- Pearsonified
- Viget Labs
- 31Three
- Sacha Greif
- Elliot Jay Stocks
- I’m Blogging That
- North x East
- Brian Jeremy
- Squawk
- Freelance Folder
- I Love Typography
- Art Culture
March 24th, 2008
Wow… this will be tough! Aside from the competition, it’s really a wonderful and inspirational post. Great work!
March 24th, 2008
Thanks Erika. I put in a lot of time getting this together so I’m glad it’s good for something!
March 24th, 2008
Nice list! I had like to see my one too
March 24th, 2008
I voted in each. If the poll were below each set of photos, the scroll + vote + move on would be easier than scroll past vote, scroll past entries, scroll back up, vote, scroll past entries a 2nd time.
March 24th, 2008
Good point Jamie. Thank you. I’ll change that for the next set.
March 24th, 2008
Excellent work, Steven! This was a truly amazing idea and will probably generate plenty of attention and bring loads of inspiration. I’m going to try to vote for them all, but at the moment, the polls are taking a pretty long time to register my votes.
Thanks for this excellent source and keep up the good work!
March 25th, 2008
Liked very much Gradn Sierra & Loon Design
March 25th, 2008
Great idea Steven, just wanted to let you know that the voting worked fine for me since some people seem to be having a problem.
Also thanks for including my blog amongst the other great ones. I am disappointed we didn’t get to see the match-up beforehand so we can place our bets. I mean that is what march madness is about right?
March 25th, 2008
Nice thing to start my day with
Really interesting poll 
It’s sure exciting, I think you placed the competitors good together. I wonder how this will go on in the next days…
March 25th, 2008
Voted! It’s interesting to see that some blog designer’s blog design have not fared as well on 1-1 based on the results as at time of voting.
March 25th, 2008
This a great work! its quite interesting, voted.
March 25th, 2008
I voted but some of those were about impossible to choose between. Very nice list though.
March 25th, 2008
Phew! Just finished voting - I’m glad one of my entries (rsspieces.com) was chosen!
March 25th, 2008
Everyone,
Thank you very much for voting, I appreciate it.
Tay,
Sorry you had some problems with the speed. There are so many images in the post, plus the poles, it’s not optimal.
Vinh,
Yeah, I thought about doing a post ahead of time just listing the brackets, but I really had no idea if subscribers would enjoy this or feel intruded if there were too many posts on the competition, so I opted for less posts.
March 26th, 2008
Now, this is a fun idea! I can’t wait to see how this turns out; Quite a few of my favorite designs are featured, besides so many I haven’t seen before.
Unfortunately, I missed out on the voting by a few hours. I knew there would eventually come a reason to never step away from the feed reader.
I have my finger on the trigger for the next round, though.
March 26th, 2008
What an excellent collection. The person who put down the initial designs, thumbs up on your excellent design taste, because if I were to make a list of blog designs, most of these will have been on it.
Fun competition indeed, though I’d vote your very clean blog design anytime!
Cheers,
Jacob
March 26th, 2008
NJ,
Sorry you missed this part. More will be coming very soon.
Jacob,
Thanks for commenting. I have been enjoying your blog recently as well.
March 26th, 2008
[...] Here is the second half of round one in the Blog Design Madness competition! If you haven’t been with us the past few days you can check out this post that introduces the competition and you can see the blogs that competed two days ago. [...]
March 29th, 2008
Oh no! I wish I’d known about this competition. definitely could have gotten some serious votes for MostlyLisa.com. aww shucks! lemme know next time.
March 29th, 2008
I have just enlarged my RSS feed list, very cool sites.
March 30th, 2008
wow .. I am in!!! hehe..thanks a lot!
March 30th, 2008
[...] you very much to everyone who participated last week in the first round of our Blog Design Madness tournament. Today round two begins, with 32 blogs still remaining. The voting will close Monday [...]
April 1st, 2008
How in the world did Big Noob lose? Thats one of the best designed blogs on the net.
April 1st, 2008
clarklab,
I was a bit surprised by that myself.
April 1st, 2008
[...] down to just 16 competitors in the Blog Design Madness competition! The voting for this round will be open until Wednesday at 9:00 PM Eastern (US), so [...]
April 2nd, 2008
Thank you for inserting artico in your contest but you did not send me any email about your initiative so i was not able to tell to my readers to vote for my design/blog. Good job guy!
April 5th, 2008
[...] down to just 8 remaining contestants in the Blog Design Madness tournament. Please take a moment to vote for your 4 favorites. This round will end Sunday at 9:00 PM - Eastern [...]
April 7th, 2008
[...] down to the Final Four in the Blog Design Madness tournament. Please take a moment to vote using these two polls. The finals will be later this week. Thanks for [...]
April 10th, 2008
[...] Blog Design Madness tournament has reached the final round! The remaining two competitors have made it through five [...]
April 13th, 2008
[...] the past few weeks we have been running Blog Design Madness, a tournament to determine the best designed blog according to our readers. The tournament was [...]