Blog Topic #4 Customize This

It was fun to try different things with customizing my previously very boring blog page. I added the gadget that shows how many people visit your page. I have discovered I am not terribly popular, and most of the visits to my site are me, myself and I, but at least the three of us usually agree on things. Using the Blogger Template Designer you can poke around at the various features and change your layout, font, colors, borders etc. Most of these changes, including fancy roll-over effects, can be found clicking on the "advanced" feature.

I changed the colors of the fonts and some of the borders to give the page a cohesive look, (going for sort of this jarring "shock and awe" color theme!?) and picked one of  Blogger's standard patterns for the background of the page. Voila!

To change my header I created a simple pattern in Illustrator. Turning on the gradient panel I drew some circles, and then saved the image as a GIF for Web and Devices. After clicking the blogger Design tab, one reaches the "Add and arrange Elements" page. Click "edit" in the header bar and here you can pick one of their backgrounds or upload one of your designs as I did.

I would have liked my custom background header to go all the way across the header but it would not repeat, and changing the size of the illustrator-created-drawing/GIF did not solve this. When I tried creating an image for the page background it did repeat however. (I did not keep that particular experimental background though) Perhaps I will go back and and try to solve the puzzle of why the header did not repeat, perhaps I could go into the htlm code and try to resolve that, but then again, perhaps I should work on my midterm project.

Blog Topic #1 Dude, this is the Coolest

I like this guy's personal web page, it's catchy, sort of funky and fun. You enter an intriguing room that invites poking around. You can roll over elements of the homepage to look at his design work; Web, Interactive, graphic, print media. You can roll over the coffee cup to check out his favorite reads or click the mail on the floor to contact.

http://www.urbanmofo.com/

It looks like it is in a state of development and he could take it even farther, but I thought it was thought provoking with the little animated elements and music score, etc.

Blog Topic #2 new adventures

To fulfill the homework assignment I addressed blog topic #2; "Can I get a Resource?".  I went to the BlueVertigo website:

http://bluevertigo.com

which I found in Karl Cleveland's syllabus. There is sort of an overwhelming number of great stuff to explore there, stock photos, clip art, photoshop brushes, sounds, etc. Many great resources each organized into categories, "free" , "cheap' and "commercial". One of the ones I like is called I love Typography:

ilovetypography.com


Here you can find a listing of articles, including one on "How to create a font" which gives you a tutorial on type creation, something I have always wanted to fool around with. Fun!