New Blog Design

If you visited this blog in the last few days you may have noticed some silly business with the blog header changing and the words on it dissappearing.  This was my attempt at trying out a few different things in an attempt to update this space a little.  I have felt for some time that the design was outdated and some of the format and content of the sidebars had outlived their use.

I initially spent a few weeks looking at branding, blog themes, designs for headers (that's where the title is at the top) and fonts.  Despite searching I could not find what I wanted even if I was prepared to pay for it - the colours were not right, or the image looked great, but once up, didn't look right.

After hours of searching for the right colours, themes, images and almost going mental and wanting to throttle someone out of frustration, I gave in and got the kids watercolours out to experiment.

With a little help I painted some washes of colour and some swatches.

I simply took photo's of these and cropped and edited them to create my new header and elements

The swatches I used to crop and create labels like the ones below.  The whole process took about half an hour from painting to cropping and resizing the image.
















I really enjoyed making my own and it has really inspired me to try out other things like posters with quotes and blog design elements.

I would love any feedback on the new look and any ideas on what else could be changed or added.  Your thoughts and ideas are really important to me!