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.
I don’t know why you are being so hard on yourself! I think you have done a great job with the header/title box, including a newspaper and using a font that dates back to the at time period. As far as the sizes of the images, that’s a hard one even for some professionals.
Comment by smdeane — April 6, 2009 @ 6:35 pm |
I think using the newspaper image is a good thing to add to the website design. I just think you should use it in a more integrated way. In the header it is too small to be meaningful, and the odd angle of the image shape doesn’t harmonize with the gothic lettering (I personally like the emboss, but defer to the Great Ones in design among us) I think you could have the newspaper image somehow on a page, where you explain it, and then use it (minus type, or faded) to make headlines in the sections of their lives that you want to feature. Another interesting way to use the newspaper would be to have that as your header background, and make the font as if it were a Headline featured that day in the newspaper, with a date (their wedding, or Grandpa’s birth) as the dateline on the paper. Just some ideas. Photoshop would help you do all of that with little more than basic skills.
Comment by susanld — April 13, 2009 @ 12:03 am |