New Header Image

January 12, 2009
By Meagan
in design, drawings

Well I guess that’s pretty obvious really. New header image, see? (*psst* look up!)

emptinessUp until yesterday night the header image for my blog was the default image that came with the Emptiness theme. It was a nice nature image, tree branches or something, but since this is supposed to be my blog, and since I’m supposedly creative, I figured I ought to get my own image up there as soon as possible. So there it is!

If it doesn’t look awesome, that’s not my fault. I spent five hours trying to position it where I wanted it, and it still won’t look right to everyone. More specifically, if you see a white stripe cutting across the top of the tree, it means you’re viewing this site in Internet Explorer. Eventually I’ll fix that, but right now I’m designing for Mozilla because it’s a better browser, IE still has lots of quirks (including rendering my header image wrong). Eventually I’ll figure out how to fix that, but for now I’m kinda stuck. I’d suggest downloading Mozilla, not only so you can view my blog in it’s full “glory” but because it’s an easier browser to use, generally more correct, and less virus prone. If you happen to be using any other browsers than Mozilla or IE and my blog looks weird, please let me know so I can take it into consideration during design.

I want to keep the clean, open feeling of this blog theme, but I’m planning on adding a 4th column (that’s right FORTH) to the left side, for ads and other, less commercial applications. I’m hoping I can do that just by tweaking Emptiness, but I may end up having to start from scratch, which could be tricky since I don’t know PHP, am barely proficient in CSS and am still unsure of the difference between XHTML and HTML. Anyway, if you have ideas or suggestions of things you’d like to see in the design of this blog I’d appreciate the input.

You can see an underdrawing of the header image in an earlier blogpost.  Eventually I’d like to replace the default avitar on the side of each blog post (the pink thing under my name) with different hand drawn avitars for different categories. Currently it’s set to display a photo for different authors, but since I’m the only author here, that’s not actually necessary.  I’m not sure if that hack is possible, but I’m going to try.  Ideally, the category avitars would be in a similar style to the header image, and could help to tie the whole thing together. We’ll see.  I also need to figure out how to tie the blog into my overall website.

About Author

Meagan

Meagan is an artist, writer, and whatever else suits her at any given moment. She lives in the Cleveland area with her husband, son and too many cats. Meagan blogs at https://hadesarrow.com/blog and cartoons at http://dragondown.com

8 Replies to “New Header Image”

  1. Björnik

    That’s one hell of a header image Meagan! I love it especially the gryphon!:) I have some suggestions though and I hope you don’t mind.

    Since it is a very wonderful illustration you might want to make it bigger so that visitors can enjoy the hard work you put in it. Maybe stretching it to the whole span of 2 or 3 columns. And the Title treatment, maybe a new font, color or larger size. It looks like just another blog entry to me. Just my 2 cents and maybe it’s just me.

    By the way, this may be too late for this but Best Wishes to you!=)

    Björnik blogged..Shah-la-Matt

  2. Meagan

    Thanks! Glad you like it. I don’t mind at all, thanks for the thoughts.

    I may play with the location some to figure out a way to make it bigger (without redrawing it, which I really don’t want to do). In it’s current location I’m worried that if it were any bigger, it would discourage people from paging down. In terms of making it feel more like a header page, do you think it would help to extend the “sky” elements (stars, round blobby asteroid things) across the top? That doesn’t solve the size issue, but it might help distinguish it from the middle column, without looking too much like a typical banner header. What do you think?

    As for the font, I am trying to keep everything pretty stark to eventually tie it in to the design of my portfolio website… if it looks like a blogpost though, I’ll have to figure something out. I might end up hand drawing that, but I’m not sure how that will work visually. I’ll have to play around with it some.

    Thanks!

  6. Meagan

    Bjornik – I’ll give it a try. I think I’ve got an idea of how to make the whole thing work, but getting the time to figure out the details is a whole nother matter! No problem about posting that here. I meant to have an email contact up somewhere on my blog, but I don’t yet, and even if I did I wouldn’t mind.

    Peter – Thanks Peter! Glad you made it to my site. You’re certainly having fun with the Contained theme, aren’t you? I think the spider is my favorite.

Comments are closed.