Now You See It...Now You See Something Else

I first created this blog about 3 months ago, and at this point, it seems appropriate to look back and reflect on how it has evolved visually since that time. I initially chose a pretty simple template, since I felt that the emphasis of a blog should be on the actual text, and I did not want to distract or take away from this too much. I figured that I would get my feet wet with the whole blogging experience before I tried any visual enhancements. Here is what my blog looked like during its initial stages:


I am usually not too attracted to overly flashy or colorful visuals, so this minimalist design suited me as I slowly familiarized myself with the Blogger software and blogging as a whole. However, as I began to get more comfortable, I couldn't help but try my hand at a visual redesign of the blog. Below is the first redesign I made, which was nothing more than a simple change to the background and link colors:


It was pretty interesting to see how a simple and easy change of color scheme had a profound impact on the initial visual impression the blog. One thing I realized is that when changing the background color, you have to make sure the other color aspects on the page match the new color scheme. This might mean changing the link, title and text colors.

After making this first change, I decided to come up with a logo for the blog, which I did with this:


The background image is that of a music mixing board, which I found on the Internet. I changed it from a color image to black and white, increased the contrast, and then cropped it down considerably, all to hopefully have it fall under fair use. I chose this image since it went along with my blog's "music" and "sounding board" related theme. I then combined this with what I thought was a pretty "cool" looking font and uploaded the logo as an image file to replace the blog title, as seen here:


Eventually, I grew out of favor with the orange background, since it seemed a bit too heavy and had a "retro" feel that I wasn't really going for. I changed it to a nice shade of green that had a lighter hue and seemed to feel more current. It also brought out the text more and made the blog easier to read:


So as it is, I'm pretty content with the look of my blog right now, as it maintains a "minimalist" type feel with an emphasis on the words, but still has some visual stimulating elements to make it interesting and individually distinguished. There is, however, always room for further redesign, if nothing more than to break up the visual monotony and change things up now and again.