Making my blog beautiful

Ever since I've had this blog, I've not enjoyed looking at it, because I didn't have a design that I liked.  I knew this required some thought, so over the past couple of weeks I've been thinking what I'd like to change. 

I bought Robin Haughton's new book, Blogging for Creatives which is a brand new book and totally worth a read (btw, I haven't been endorsed in any way to write that) because it sets out the main things to consider when you're starting out blogging. There are also hundreds of tutorials and pages out there to look at. 

So off I went to my hidden blog (or now test blog!) to test my ideas out.  I started with the banner, and found loads of great advice.  

Here are some places for info:

Songbird  

Sneaky Momma 

In fact, Sneaky Momma has oodles of info for beginners to experts on blog design.  I looked at Scrapblog, but I think it's been shut down or moved.  I read that Picnik got shut down, but thankfully replaced with Ribbet which is identical in every way, and just plain amazing! 

I made my banner by making a collage, selecting a 1x4 grid, and editing the background colour. Once you click Done, then you can do all sorts with the menus at the top, add text etc. It allows you to upload photos onto your design, so I made my own flowers in Paint (tedious, but worth it) and superimposed them onto the banner.  I recommend having a go - it's really fun! 

Onto the colour scheme.  Remember I told you about the interior design class I took back in May? There we picked photos from magazines that we liked, and matched paint colours to the ones in the photo to develop a "colour eye".  Then we had to choose 1-2 colours to go with it, and decide what type of colour scheme it was.  In the absence of my own house to make over and paint, I realised that the blog would be the perfect place to implement my colour scheme! 

Oh my there are some cool things on the internet. This nifty page lets you browse colour schemes, upload your own photo or link to a photo on the internet, and it picks out the colours in it and gives the hex colour value for the main colours.  If you type the hex value into this awesome page you can convert that to rgb values.  Armed with those hex and rgb values you can go crazy in Paint, or Ribbet and specify the exact colours. SWEET!  

Long story short, you can upload any photo you like, and make the colours on your computer.  So clever! Doing this meant I could copy my colour scheme from a photo and add it to various elements in the blog.  I'm so glad I made the change!

Anyone else been re-designing their blog, or newbies like me figuring out a design they like?