Logo Graphics

I never had a real logo for my last blog design, and I really liked it when others had a clear cut one. So from the start I knew I wanted a certain shaped with the blog name written inside it. But at the same time that sounds very plain, and the last thing I want is plain. So I searched for a doodle frame or tag and came upon this fabulous website: Delicous Scraps. She's exactly what I was looking for. There's a ton of free doodle tags, plain pattern background wallpapers. Here's a few things she has to offer, for free (click on picture to be taken to the download page): And if there's something...

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Pages Navigation: Graphics

Continuing from where I left of in the last post about Pages Navigation organization... Now that I know what I want the labels, or pages, to be, I also had a very defined way I want them to appear and look. I wanted them to look like file tabs, like in filling cabinets, but also be a bit whimsical and not the simple file tab shape we're used to. After some doodling on a piece of paper (I'm not very good at hand drawing things, or being creative with drawing), I managed to draw up some pretty cute looking tabs, don't you think?! I scanned the piece of paper and opened it up in photoshop. I...

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Pages Navigation

Last time, I talked about blog content organization, and I mentioned the pages bar, briefly. To recap, I'm making a few pages, you know, those essentials that aren't quite blog content, but still essential or expected. I'm talking About and Contact, Buttons page and Parties and Features page that I decided to present as pages to free up some valuable sidebar real estate. They are nice to have, but can be quite cluttersome, so having them out of the way at the top and bottom as individual pages seemed like a smart move. I'm really hoping they will be easy to locate, especially the button page...

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Blog Content Organization: Navigation

Everybody's got their own way of organizing and displaying their content. Some do it well, some not so well (just a fact...). Nothing frustrates me more when I find a blog post I really enjoy than not being able to find more content to enjoy on that blog. Needless to say, I don't stay there very long. So far, I've been trying to divide up the subject of blog content organization. It's such a huge portion of the blog, and quite multifaceted when you start thinking about it. And sometimes one doesn't realize just how much thought does, and should go into planning it well, because it's more "behind-the-scenes"...

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Blog Content Organization : Labels and Categories

Content organization is something you want to start thinking about early on in your blogging journey. The sooner you start, the easier it is to maintain, the more likely you are to get started and keep it going. No one wants to organize 100+ posts worth of content in one shot; ok maybe some people who love to organize (I started when I had about 40 posts because that's when I started to have enough stuff to organize into categories). If you want to just dab your toes in it to start, I recommend a Project Gallery type of page. You don't need to categorize yet, but all your projects are in one place...

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Blog Content Organization: Project Gallery

Blog navigation, to me, is one of the most useful, and essential part of a blog. You want any readers coming to your blog to be able to find more stuff to read, which means more pageviews for you! So you have to help them find what they want, and more importantly, what they didn't even know they wanted! At the beginning of your blog journey, you're gonna dab in a bit of this, and a bit of that. You may not know what your categories are, and you may not want to commit yourself right away. That's ok. I suggest you start a Project Gallery as soon as you can, though! You don't need to categorize,...

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Choosing a Color Palette

I mentioned a while ago now that I wanted to write about choosing a color palette, but have been putting it off because I wanted to code more. Now I want to get it out of the way. Now, all time I designed my blog I chose a scrapbook kit and that pretty much dictated what my color palette was going to be. This time around, all the elements I found that I liked were just plain overlays, doodles, etc that were just borders without a predefined color. Also, maybe I didn't find a scrapbook kit I liked this time around because the color palette was off. Anyway, I had to choose my own colors to design...

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Header Layout

When I started thinking about this new blog design, I knew I wanted to make better use of my header. The space above the fold is very precious real estate, it's the first bit of your blog a reader sees, it sets the tone and feel of a blog. As much as I loved my old header, it was just an image, and it was not very useful in any other way. Ok, I did have a menu below it, that was useful, but that's it. It's become more and more of a trend to put different elements right within the header, for ease of use to the reader. Social media icons, email subscription, search bar are all a common part of...

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Choosing Media Breakpoints

One thing that has been nagging me in the back of my head and prevented me from moving forward is that I wasn't sure of the layouts I wanted to get for different media devices. I didn't know how many breakpoints I wanted, or where those breakpoints would be best situated. Sure I've read of some in articles, they mostly reference the iPad and iPhone, and well, I'm kinda anti-Apple... So I didn't want to base myself on them but rather on actual resolutions. So I took the time to look through my google analytics for my blog and see what people are viewing my webpage on. In my mind, I saw a total...

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Translucent Backgrounds and Round Corners

One of the rules defined in CSS3 is opacity of background images. The moment I read that I knew I'd be taking advantage of that feature to do something I had in my head. I wanted to make my outer-wrapper container translucent, so that it frames the entire blog but still shows a bit of the beautiful background I've got going on. So I set the color to white and then added the little bit of code for opacity. Easy peasy! Right?! Wrong! Turns out, this affects everything inside the container. All the text all the images are now also transclucent. Not what I was going for!! So after a bit of digging,...

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Responsive Design: Setting the Widths, and Background Color

So I was gonna do a post to say I needed to add a background color (white) to the parts with writing: post, sidebar header, then as soon as I did that I realized I needed to play with the margins and paddings, which need to be in % if I'm to do a responsive design, so what the heck I'm gonna start the responsive design thing right now with the width of the containers. Good place and time as any to start. So yes after a couple of lines of code to make the backgrounds white to be able to read properly, I get this: And then with some adjustments to the width and padding of the main containers...

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Setting the Body Background Image

The background image, or graphic, was one of the first graphic elements I made for the new design. I knew I wanted I pattern, and for it to be predominantly white, yet still quite colorful. I'd found this graphic designer, Delicious Scraps, and I loved her stuff because you could use them to create your own graphics with them using your own color scheme. Perfect! Exactly what I needed since I hadn't yet found a scrapbook kit with a color scheme I liked and elements I was longing for. And I can pretty much guarantee no one else will have the same background as me! So, first order of business:...

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Ready Set Start! aka Removing Attribution

Alright, I've finished indexing (indenting?) the basic blogger template. It was Loooooong! Made me think of the wax on wax off exercise, lol. It was fun at first, but it got really repetitive. It made me realize just how many little widgets and links and such goes into a blogger template! I'm glad I'm not starting from scratch. But it almost feels like it when this test blog looks like this after loading that template: Complete blank slate!! And no nonsense in the template that I can't make sense of! So I've noticed a few things in the Layout Mode: The Navbar and Attribution are in the...

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Gotta Start Somewhere... Or Not

Yesterday, I was finally feeling tired of reading, and reading and reading instead of actually DOING, so I decided it would be the day that I would actually make a change to my base template. There's only so much you can read before you have to actually START. So you're expecting something to have changed on the template, right? Well, trying to change SOMETHING (I decided to go easy and just add my background) highlighted some challenges that I did not foresee because I hadn't actually LOOKED at my template yet. I THOUGHT I understood the skeleton of blogger, but then I looked at the head tag,...

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Tip: Printscreen What You Love

Whenever I'm browsing the internet, I'm always on the lookout for awesome designs and graphic elements. If you don't know yet, I'm quite particular about what I like. I like intricate and different. Which really will not make my job of designing my own blog very easy, but I'm up for the challenge, no matter how long it takes. So when I see a blog or website that I like a particular feature, I printscreen the part I like and paste it into a page of my Blog Design Section of my Blog OneNote Notebook. I mark down the website it's from and what I particularly like about the design: the layout, the...

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Research, Pt 3

Yesterday, I read the eBook I referenced in my 2nd post. Well, it didn't help any. It was basically a guide to help you choose a premade template. Or well that's what I got out of it. There were the very very basic customization of template (change the background image, font and color, I think) but that was it. BUT, I did found a pretty awesome website with very good tutorials to customize your blogger template. It's Help Logger, and I've found quite a few new tutorials for customizing things I didn't think you even could, like removing the Powered by Blogger note at the bottom of the template. I'm...

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Research,Pt 2

ACtually, you know what, if I'm to do this, I'm gonna do it right (well until I get too lazy to write it all down). I'll document here, or try to, everything I read and my thoughts. Maybe this could be useful for someone else, to see the thought process that goes behind designing a blog. First let me say I am BY NO MEANS a proffesionnal. I don't even know if I can say I'm an amateur because I've done all of 2 designs. I will count my LiveJournal "blog", that is how I learned HTML and CSS and when I started learning how to tweak both, even if only very very rudimentarily. Then I did my own blog...

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Research

Hello, this is my test blog for testing my new blog design over at Color Me Domestic. I am writing test entries to verify that everything works as intended, and I thought I'd document my progress here as well, kinda more journal style. It won't be pretty, and I'll probably ramble on a lot, but it doesn't matter. I doubt many people will read it. So I started my new blog design officially in February. I made the logo and background, and then it kinda came to a stop. Isn't it weird how the more you use your creativity, the more you WANT to use it. I find I have to make a great effort to get going,...

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