Google Adsense and other ad units can make your beautifully crafted site look awkward and even cheap. But you can’t remove your ad units entirely to make way for your designs, especially if your income depends on the on the clicks, views, etc. Here are some tips based on experience:

• Blend your ad unit’s color template to match your site’s template.  Most ad unit templates are modifiable and allow you to customize the link, border, text and background color. This way, your ad units will look like it’s part of your site’s content and won’t turn off potential readers.
• Place your ads in between content. The large square units are great here! This is effective if you’re content is text heavy, the ad unit would hopefully allow the reader to take a breather from the heavy content and temporarily focus on something else – like your ad unit!
• Make your ad units look like internal links. Small banners and text links are effective in pulling this off. Anything bigger would be obvious. Again, blending the unit’s template with your site template is key here.
• If you have a related posts widget posted after the content, create a text-only ad unit and plug it in after the widget. This makes it look like it’s part of the related posts ensuring that it gets a quick scan.

Effectively placed ad units can go a long way, both aesthetically and financially! Hope that helped! Many thanks to Randy for the related posts tip!