In the literature, pairwise balanced block designs and variance balanced block designs have been completely characterized and constructed for block size 3. In this note, some necessary conditions for the existence of such designs have been derived for any block size k. Then we construct series of designs with block sizes 4 and 5 as well as obtain two series for any k. Nonexistence results for certain small designs are proved. © 2020 Charles Babbage Research Centre. All rights reserved.