Our New Look

Word on the street is that the Darlings have a new blog design.  Yes, indeed!  Why the change?  Here's the process we went through to get to what you see in front of you:

Last week, Kyle informed me that he didn't really like the look of our blog.  The general feeling was "too much wood" and after seeing that design for almost a year, I was happy to change it!  Kyle did some research on Blogger themes and threw out the idea of switching the platform to Wordpress.  I don't know if anyone's been paying attention, but since I do a majority of the blogging on here, I didn't want to switch the platform just for a new look.  Call me crazy, but I'd rather be using a platform I like, am used to, and integrates well with my online presence.  Kyle and I, separately, looked into writing the html ourselves.  Kyle decided it wasn't worth the effort; I decided that it was a challenge I was willing to accept to 1) make our blog look awesome and 2) keep my man happy (and hopefully blogging more than he has in the past year).

I started looking at other blogs that I like and simplified ours to white with a simple text header, upgrading the buttons to the ones you see currently.  Kyle informed me that he didn't like that it was all white and that it should have color or something.  I really disliked plain color on the outsides, and a lot of cool patterns I put in that space were too busy - it was hard to focus on the text and photos.  I started looking at "textures" and realized that the texture also has to be the right color otherwise it, too, makes the screen look busy.  We both really liked this linen texture so it stuck.  I then tried to figure out what we could do with the header.  I'm not a graphic designer by any means, so I really had no idea what to put in that white void at the top of the page.  I was really proud of myself for finding the cool fonts (that I love) for the blog title and buttons, but finding a graphic was a mountain I could not climb.  I toyed with the idea of making a photo collage (3 photos) to run across the top, I thought of finding some cool watercolor droplets, and that was pretty much the end of my trail...  While messing with the photo collage idea, I realized that I really love this photo of the two of us.  The one that was previously the header had been my favorite photo of us, until this beauty came along.

Slapping that photo to the top of the blog just felt right.  It felt very "us" and had just the right amount of color.  If you look closely, the green in the trees matches fairly well with the green of the dates.  Crazy coincidence - I promise!  So there you have it, folks.  Kyle approves of our "new look" and I'm in love with it.  It's minimalist but still has some pizzazz.  Very "us". ;)

Out with the old:

In with the new:

In the end, I didn't have to mess with the html.  I had even consulted my dad, currently teaching a course on html, about writing html and a CSS and was very prepared to get to work on it after my exams (or Thanksgiving Break...or as a "little by little" project).  Thankfully, I was able to work with what I knew to create something we both appreciate.