Blog Design Blog

I spent last night working on the header design for this blog, because the one that was there before was from a theme I created and it lacked any sort of visual interest. It wasn’t uncommon for people to tell me it was boring so I decided to set some time out last night to redesign it before I roll out with the article on redesigning headers.

Planning and Designing stage

When I was working on the header, one of the tricky things to work on was the logo of the blog at the same time, because I initially didn’t have one. The blog was using my dreamworks redux wordpress theme so it didn’t really stand out and represented the brand or feeling I wanted the blog to evoke.

I used the traditional methods of creating a logo at first, which was writing down concepts that I wanted the logo to brand, then brainstorming what would represent those concepts, after that I drew sketches of the logo in different variations, and finally I worked in photoshop playing with different colors, sizes, textures, and variations. After about 4-6 hours of work, I just scratched it all and decided to start from the beginning again, because nothing was really working or speaking to me the way I wanted it to.

Redesigning stage

In the end, I decided to go with what you see on top now by trying to approach it at a different angle. One of the main goals I had for the header redesign was to make it more visually interesting. I solved that by adding more color and texture in the background. I also added a slight gradient on the background pattern to give it some more depth. One of my other goals I had was to utilize the conversation bubble above the navigation better. Through a few experimentation with different content, I decided to take interesting quotes from articles I wrote. It turned out to look great and would help pique people’s interest in the article I wrote.

The last piece was the logo, which I tried to experiment again with various variations in placement, size, images, and color. In the end, I decided to go with something very simple and light that I stumbled upon by experimenting with the fonts. I think it came out looking well.

Feel free to add any comments, questions, or insults.

I will be writing up an article on redesigning headers soon. Subscribe today and get updated when new articles are posted.