The Bubbles Aesthetic

I’ve been vaguely reading the Bubbles RSS feed for the past month or so. Bubbles aggregates a bunch of “small web”/”indie web” blogs, which sounds like it should give you a variety of diverse, interesting things to read: Original, different approaches to writing and design and etc etc etc, right? I don’t want to be mean, but it’s not working. The above grid is pretty representative, and it’s striking how uniform the blogs are. OK, I’m being unfair. While going through the newest entries in the feed, I removed a couple that didn’t use this template. But this really is what you’re going to see almost all the time if you’re reading these blogs. How did all of these people arrive at the same design? Well, many of these “indie” blogs are hosted on Bear Blog. And that’s the colour scheme they use… so everybody’s who’s hosting their texts there are using something similar? That is, a kinda desaturated bluish-gray background, and then text that’s also kinda bluish grayish, leaving you with a…