Back when the world was young and I worked as an employee communications staffer at ARCO, our design maven—a ball of fire named Jessie Garrett—used to pore over copies of Communication Arts looking for inspiration and ideas to adapt to the various publications we produced. CA is still around—and still a terrific design resource—but the web makes it easy to assemble examples of good ideas that are far more accessible in much less time.

I stumbled across a collection of To 20 blog designs while trolling through Digg. The designs were selected by the CSSBloom team. Since the CSSBloom site has no “about” link, I’m still not altogether sure who’s behind it or what they’re doing, but it seems that web, blog, and other online designs are submitted and visitors can vote (one to five stars) on each design.

I can’t say I was thrilled with each and every one of the top 20, but it’s great to know there’s such dynamic thinking about blog design going on out there amidst all the default templates most people opt to use with little or not customization. It’s also great to see that Stephen Davies’ PR Blogger made the list. If you’re looking for a bit of inspiration for your own blog design, you could do worse than spend 20 minutes reviewing the designs of these 20 blogs.