Monday, March 5, 2012

The Design is Done! (until I change my mind again)

Hello Everyone,

"Hey... it looks different around here..." Yes it does! I have finished the design, finally. WAHOO!

I realized that finishing the design of this blog was the bottleneck for several of my other big projects that I have planned for 2012. So last week I essentially went into my room and shut the door to get it done! Housework, dinner, and laundry be damned (why yes, it was a little gross here by Saturday). But I finally finished and here it is!

Allow me to show you around...

I decided that this blog is going to be where I indulge my love of all things girly and I tried to do it without being cutesie or childish. I hope I accomplished that ;-) I love pink (Hun HATES it so I can't use it in the house) so it's the featured color here. My blog, my colors, nah nah nn, okay, I'll stop now.

I also wanted to include hearts in the design, because I love hearts! But again, I didn't want to have the design slide into cutesie, so they are very small, yea even subtle. Even the favicon is teeny, rather than using all 256 possible pixels, I made it even smaller. I'm thinking that the teeny, raspberry-colored heart will be the Home Again Jog signature. I'm planning on using it on my print items too. I might even get a tiny heart stamp.

Basically, I remade every item on the page. The gray heart pattern, the chevron stripe background, the frame on the 40 x 40 and the flourishes are so easy to make in Illustrator. Especially now that I know what I'm doing, thanks to the Ornaments and Patterns classes that I just finished. Thank you Alma!

I made the social media buttons too. Well, I wanted cute ones that matched the blog design! Oh, did you know that Facebook, Twitter, Feed Burner, and Pinterest all have downloadable, editable, vector versions of their logos? Well they do...  but they are hidden in the virtual basement of each of their sites. It's almost is if they don't want people to fiddle with them...(actually, they really don't.)  It was like a vector image treasure hunt where all the clues were wrong. But I found them, eventually.

Not only did I find the vectors and create my own buttons but I also managed to add the social media buttons and get them to work. That requires some minimal HTML coding which I find scary. I not-so-secretly fear that I will crash my entire blog with one misplaced /<a>. So it was with much trepidation that I fiddled with the html. I am very excited that I got them to line up, space correctly, AND work. I think I could actually do it again in blogger.  I am marking this day on my calendar because this is so amazing.

Let's see, I added an RSS button so you can subscribe if you do that sort of thing, I added a "follow by email" widget too so if you want to know when I post, you can. I may start using an RSS feed to keep track of my blogging friend's posts because I miss them sometimes.

I'm trying to remember if I missed something... Oh, I added a matching cover to my FB page and a matching background to my Twitter profile. I am now very coordinated, at least from a design standpoint. I still catch volleyballs with my face. That kind of coordination will never happen.

I also get to cross this off my 40 x 40! I really like crossing stuff off that list! Let me tell you, if you ever feel like you never finish a list, like I usually do, publish it on your blog. It's motivating.

My next projects are creating ten design "sets" kind of like this one that can be personalized and eventually taking clients for custom work again. There's a note about that up on the right.

So that's all for today (that's enough right?)

I'm having some dental work done tomorrow under anesthesia (no big deal) but I mention that as a disclaimer if tomorrow's post is, uh, interesting.

See you then!
H


7 comments:

  1. I can't wait for tomorrow's post. And I want to play volleyball with you sometime. :-)

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  2. Morgen, I love how your take-away from this post is "Heather catches volleyballs with her face and blogs on drugs."

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  3. Love the 'girly' aspects of your blog and LOVE the rasperry heart being your signature. You are so clever! And your social media buttons; super cute!
    Awesome job....
    Yes, Heather blogging on drugs could be fun!!! Hope the dental work goes smoothly xxx

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  4. Congrats Heather, really great work you have done! Looks really nice and pretty. And I really like your presentation text in the header, it's very Heather :-)

    Love the grey heart pattern - it's really a pattern, not hearts on a row!

    I follow blogs with Bloglovin, works very well for me.

    Hope your dental work goes well tomorrow, and don't do anything stupid when you're on drugs! :-)

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  5. I pick up on the details. I think that is one of my most charming features, no?

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  6. Leah, thank you for your kind complements! You have a way of making me feel AWESOME! Your comments always brighten my day :-)

    Maria, I'm so glad that you said my blurb is very "Heather," it's a relief! I wanted to make sure that the goofy silly me is still represented ;-)

    I am on Bloglovin! I may need to update my stuff and add the button, I completely forgot about that!

    I think I managed not to be stupid... silly though.

    Morgen - today's (the 6th) post was a happy pill one, did you notice? Larry, Daryl and Daryl Construction... why did I write that?

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