Wow you guys, welcome! And Happy 2018! As you can see things looks a little different around here, and I am so excited to finally show you the project I've been working on for the last couple of weeks. It's been an entire year since I started this blog (throwback to my very first blog post on New Year 2017 here), and it's been both a fun experiment in creativity as well as a bit of hard work! I've been wanting to better define my blog aesthetic for a while now, and with a little bit of brainstorming, photoshop, and design from Georgia Lou Studios I've finally put together a digital space that I'm proud of.
While setting out to define my blog's aesthetic, I knew that I wanted to have a couple main focal and accent colors in addition to two or three fonts that I regularly used; this is essential to making everything look cohesive and consistent. To achieve this I pulled a couple photos from my Pinterest boards whose colors I was drawn to, opened them in Photoshop, and used the dropper tool to pinpoint specific colors. If you do this process yourself you'll want to pick out about 8-10 colors that you love; after that it's really just a matter of mixing and matching them to see which colors combine well. It's actually not an incredibly difficult or time-consuming process, and it can even be a little fun. I spent about an hour or two one evening in bed with my laptop, and I could not be happier with the result.
When I started I knew that I wanted my aesthetic to be simple and feminine, and nothing says "feminine" quite like the color pink! If you've visited my blog before then you will remember that the old site design used a similar shade of pink, and while I had free reign to complete change the look and feel of my blog and even toyed with the idea of doing the whole minimal black and white thing, I knew that it just wasn't what I wanted. I can't help but be drawn in by the color, it jumps out at me from beautiful floral bouquets, stationary, textiles, and even from Seattle's beautiful peachy pink sunsets, and so I knew that the color had to make it's way into my new design. I swatched sooooo many shades of pink, you guys don't even know! But once I started moving colors around and seeing what paired well I finally nailed down the perfect pink!
As to the rest of the color palette, it is pretty soft and neutral with two pretty shades of gray that I have already used a ton in previous blog posts. My favorite part is the beautiful brownish yellow accent shade for when I want to liven up any of my graphics with a little bit of color. I'm in love with it.
Setting up my blog and customizing it was a bit more time-consuming then deciding on fonts and colors. If you are comfortable writing your own code, then actually bringing your blog to life from scratch can be a very time-consuming task that takes months. Since I'm not quite at the level with my own coding skills, I opted to purchase a customizable Blogger theme and I don't regret my choice at all. It dramatically cut down the amount of time I had to spend designing a completely new blog. The one thing I HIGHLY recommend is setting up a separate blog to use as a test site. This way you can set up your blog exactly the way you want to and fix any bugs that might come up without having to disrupt traffic to your live site. Once everything is set up the way you want it, you can export the file to your live blog, make any adjustments you need to make (for example, some links might need to be adjusted), and viola!
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| Blog design inspo via Papel & Co. |
This new blog design was the perfect way for me to celebrate the one year anniversary of my blog, and while I am not making any moves to quit my day job any time soon, I have been busy brainstorming new blog post ideas to publish in the upcoming weeks and I can't wait. I am eager to see how this space grows and changes in 2018, and it is my hope to begin working more on my photography skills to start bringing you more original content and to begin finding new ways to fuel my desire to be creative. (But first I have to replace the camera lens that I dropped and broke months back and haven't gotten around to replacing. Whoops....).
I hope all of your years are start off on the right foot, and I encourage you to set specific and attainable goals for yourself that will actually benefit you mentally, professionally, and/or physically. Make 2018 your year!
P.S. Don't be shy! I would love to hear some of your 2018 New Year's goals in the comments below :)
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