During Chris’s two and a half weeks of Christmas vacation, we spent our time redesigning a few blogs. We had a grand time working together & making the interwebs a tiny bit prettier. I’ll be sharing a finished project each week along with a design tip (or two) for a better blog.
M from The Girl Who Wore Everything was another fantastic client to work with. She she wanted her blog to look more professional & convey her love for fashion (and sparkles!). Her blog was a fairly blank slate to work with, she didn’t have any insane templates going on and she didn’t want anything insane, either.
I liked the glasses she was wearing in the header the presence of white space in her old design. So I incorporated those two with more fashion-iconic typefaces, glitter and a more grown-up color palette and voila!
For the fonts I used Baskerville semibold italic and Open Sans Condensed Light. For the glitter, I made my own using Pugly Pixel‘s & Scrapbook Bytes photoshop glitter tutorials. I made an animated gif of the bloglovin button so the glitter actually sparkles (FUN!). Check out The Girl Who Wore Everything to see the design in action.
• DESIGN TIP #4: LEARN MORE, DESIGN LESS •
There are so many fantastic resources for expanding your design knowledge. My favorites are: Nicole’s Classes, Pugly Pixel, Lynda.com. There you can begin or expand on your knowledge of design-based programs like Illustrator & photoshop. All have been a fantastic resource for me as I have been trying to branch out of my very 2-dimensional design box. Go check them out.
I’m definitely speaking out of experience/mistake here, but as you do learn new tools for photo editing and design you don’t need to use all of the tools all at the same time. I remember as I was learning photoshop my freshman year of college, I applied 4-10 filters to my projects and quickly realized that many of the tools offered in these programs are spices, not staples. In illustrator, I typically stick to 2-3 tools. In photoshop, it’s about the same. This same principle applies to blogs as well. Keep it simple.
Do you have any favorite resources for expanding your design knowledge?
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