How To: Making of a Blog Design

It seemed appropriate to follow the inaugural post with one about the blog’s background design since it’s the foundation that gives My Life With Creativity, well, life.

I don’t like spending the majority of my day on the computer so I was incredulous at how obsessed I had become working on getting the blog setup. Entire afternoons would zip by as I sat reading, learning, customizing, occasionally cursing, and constantly tweaking with no concept of how long I’d been plastered to the screen. I’m not always a particularly patient person either, but give me something I want badly enough and I forego the muttering and teeth gnashing and jump in with a voracious hunger.

What I definitely wanted was a theme (blog speak for format) that could be customized without having to know programming language and with a user-friendly platform to do that customizing. If I’m going to be bilingual, being fluent in a romance language like Italian or French is more to my liking. A nod to fellow art friend Laura Gaffke for turning me onto Angie Makes, a blog designer whose themes can be purchased on Creative Market. Creative Market is a mega on-line site brimming with countless website designs, blog themes, templates, fonts, graphics and all things web-design worthy that you can buy to create the look you want. Talk about choices! I need to add that if you subscribe to get Creative Market’s email’s, on occasion you can get free stuff like fonts.

I could have used a free blog theme through WordPress.com or other blog hosting sites but those didn’t satisfy my desires on style or functionality. Free also means limited versatility. Besides, the blog is all about creativity. I wanted the ability to make it visually say, “This is so Carol.” I bought a theme from Angie Makes that’s compatible with WordPress.org. No worries, I won’t bore you with the differences between WordPress.com and .org. Suffice to say, that was a whole other learning curve. I did find through my research that WordPress.org is like the olympian of the blog world and would provide the maximum versatility I wanted.  Big Kudos to Angie and Chris at Angie Makes for their stellar supply of video how-to’s for customizing the theme and quick response customer service when I was stumped despite the copious resources provided. 

To know me is to know that I truly don’t “do” pink. I figure it’s due to a deficit in typical, female pink genes, so I was especially surprised to have actually paid $$ for a theme that featured “that color” in its header and highlighted areas. In my defense, it was the way-cool watercolor splash design in the “Kensie” theme’s header that dazzled me. Because I knew I could change the color of the splash design to one from my preferred palette or even upload my own header, a user-friendly, customization feature of the theme, then there was no duplicity involved and I was still being true to myself.

Once I downloaded the theme though, it didn’t seem right to use someone else’s header design. My Life With Creativity needed my creativity in the header. It was a matter of integrity. Now, here’s where the hands-on, creative fun begins.

Because of an art workshop I gave once upon a time, I bought a box of 14”x14” square deli paper sheets, from a local restaurant supply store. They were perfect for using underneath the projects being worked on to keep any wandering paint that might be applied with exuberance from damaging tables since the paint wouldn’t bleed through the paper. Problem was, I couldn’t buy a reasonable quantity. I had to buy 3,000, a supply for at least 100 lifetimes since I don’t have any dreams of opening up a sandwich shop. Yet, the price was reasonable for the quantity.

In an attempt to dwindle down the, now, barely less than 3,000 sheet supply, I use them myself for blotter paper when I work in my Petite Studio. I soon found they serve me well producing all sorts of funky patterns I can use for some of my mixed media work. I am an exuberant artist! The paper is translucent, almost like vellum, and the acrylic inks I often use tend to bead up on the slick surface spawning unexpected and compelling designs.

In Sherrill Kahn’s book, Creative Mixed Media: Paint, Print, Stitch, Stamp, Embellish, I learned about making my own stamps by using children’s hobby foam sheets that have an adhesive back. Cut out the shapes you want, adhere them to heavy corrugated cardboard or any other durable surface and stamp away. If using corrugated cardboard, I suggest waterproofing the cardboard with a coating of clear acrylic medium or equivalent to better prepare the cardboard before you adhere the stamp design. Cleaning the stamps after use and getting the cardboard wet shortens the life span of untreated cardboard and thus the stamp. I’ve used watercolor, diluted acrylic, acrylic ink and stamp pad ink with the stamps. As noted earlier, acrylic ink tends to bead up a bit on the stamp but that suits me just fine because of the unusual patterns it creates.

Employing my trusty neutral sepia and burnt umber acrylic inks, I brushed them onto a large stamp with uneven width horizontal lines and stamped away on a sheet of deli paper. I was thrilled with the results. The neutrality of the colors would allow the photos I post on the blog to stand out more plus the colors scream “my palette”.

After scanning the stamped deli paper and uploading into Photoshop, cropping, fine tuning and adding the blog and sub title text, the header was ready to upload to the blog theme. Because the background that came with the blog didn’t go with my header, I searched again on Creative Market for a suitable background design. Although I probably could have also created my own, not knowing the size needed, etc., I decided to help the economy and fellow creative types by purchasing a downloadable background. Helping the economy may be a stretch, I paid a paltry $2 for a total of eight different colored backgrounds to get the one I liked from Joyful Heart Designs. There were so many delicious-looking backgrounds it made me want to be able to use them all!

Ta-Da! The result of all my efforts is the design you see that serves up my blog posts. There’s an abundance of self-satisfaction I feel in having spent the time researching, asking, and doing some hand’s-on creating to end up with a design I feel visually reflects some of my essence. The content of the blog posts themselves will reflect and reveal even more.

You can easily switch the word “creativity” for the word “art” in the following quote. It happened to me during this enjoyable blog design unfolding.

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Thomas Merton (American Trappist monk, writer, poet, mystic)

Posted by carol@mylifewithcreativity.com & filed under How To. This post has 2 comments.