Showing posts with label tip. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tip. Show all posts

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 color, the shapes, the doodliness, etc, so that there's no question later on when I go through all the websites I've noted down. I'll also write down if I think any changes would make the design even better and more to my liking.

Oh and BTW I use the program Gadwin Printscreen to manage all my printscreens. You have many useful options with this simple program, like printscreening the entire screen, just the browser window (I think), or choosing a rectangular area yourself. You can either chose to have the cursor in the image, or not. And it will save all your printscreen images to a folder on your computer, in case you don't want to paste it anywhere but just keep something for future reference. Of course it also copies to your clipboard (that virtual memory that remembers the last thing you either printscreened of copied, be it text or image) so you can paste it somewhere (in my case my OneNote) before taking an other printscreen.

The reason why I printscreen as opposed to just mark down the website whose design I like is because you never know when they will decide to change their design and your inspiration is gone. There are many designs in my OneNote that have since changed, and I'm so glad I decided to printscreen it!! Sometimes I'm even sad to see the design go because I really loved it.

I wouldn't use the printscreens (images) on the web just to show what I like without having asked permission first to do so, which is why there are no images here to illustrate my point. Maybe one day I will take the time to ask around to share, we will see.

I also have a page more for graphic elements that I like. I've looked a lot through scrapbook kits and scrapbook element designers websites to get inspiration and elements to use in my own design (mostly for free), and I've decided to try and make my design elements mostly from scratch, either from doodles I hand drawn (I'm not very good at drawing though...) or free shapes around the internets.

In that regard, I TRY to pin free stuff I like to my Free Digital Art Pinterest Board. I could be better at this though. But if you're in the marker for great scrapbook like designers, you can look through there. There's a lot of fonts in there too.

That's my tip for today!
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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 going through some tutorials and saving the ones which I would like to implement down the line. So many things to customize, it's gonna take a while!

I did want to share how I am organizing my saved links for future reference. I use OneNote Notebooks to organize pretty much everything in my life right now. I know some people like paper notebooks better, but I seriously think that electronic Notebooks are becoming more and more useful because we have so much electronic information to keep track of, and printing is so wasteful.

So I have a OneNote notebook dedicated to my Blog, and a Section for my Blog Design. I've got a page in there that I'm collecting links to tutorials and they are separated by which section the tutorial is for (header, post, sidebar, footer, social media etc).

Sometimes, you don't know you want to customize your blog a certain way because you don't even realize it's possible. This way, I'm perusing different tutorials and noting what I CAN do, and later I will chose what I WILL do. I'm still curious, because most tutorials only tell you what you need to know for that tutorial, and might not give you all the options possible. I wonder how much more you could customize beyond just that tutorial but still the same element.

I want to make a sorta series on how I use OneNote on my main blog Color Me Domestic, because it's really like my ultimate resource for absolutely everything, and I'm sure others can benefit from it too. All in due time I suppose.
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