My presentation tonight will be a perfect example of what not to do. With that in mind, here’s my explanation: I picked wordpress in part because its various themes offered some design flexibility in choosing colors. The particular theme I selected in wordpress has three or four color options. I selected the ”Autumn” pallette because it gave my site an older look and it also matched some of the yellowish newspaper images I wanted to include as part of my logo. Therefore, in designing my logo, I knew that I wanted to include an image of my grandparents’ newspaper, the Hays County Herald. So, using photoshop, I matched the brown color that wordpress provided as part of the Autumn pallette and I dropped in an image of an old yellowing copy of the Herald. The newspaper used an Old English font on its front page. I simply tried to copy this font in my design. With my daughter’s invaluable assistance, we found an ”embossing” feature in photoshop that made the text look like it was raised. I liked that look so we applied that feature the website’s title, “A Life Together.” I also tried to apply the Old English font to the site description but that was too hard to read because the text was significantly smaller. As a result, I just used Ariel for the site description. What I found to be more difficult than picking colors and fonts for the logo/header was determining the proper size of the image. After much trial and error, 681 pixils wide by 110 pixils tall appeared to be the best guess but I may not have it right yet…as you will see shortly. Anyway, here is my finished logo/header. Looks pretty cool, right? Not!
Now, if you are viewing this on anything less than a widescreen monitor, stand-by for real good laugh. Here is the logo/header applied to my website.
Obviously, the search box is kicking my butt.
