I am working on an image template for projects that I want to list on this site. Square dimensions seem to sit best with my site’s theme and therefore display the best. I also want some design uniformity, so in addition to shape and size, I am sticking with my color palette.
A Busy Beginning
I thought that was a good start, but the more I look at it, the busier it gets. The font has got to go. The image is too small, especially for a mobile user, and I am not sure of the placement of everything. Back to the drawing board to reach my goals.
Less is More
This is better. I ditched the Bookman font for Georgia. It still has the serif, but it is not so squat, and it more closely resembles the font of this theme, Alegreya. I also swapped out spaces between image and brief, changing the aspect ratio for the image and devoting less space for the brief. That makes sense because I will be writing about the project in the post, so not much is needed, and mobile users will require more image here.
I am getting a little closer to the design I want. I will refine it more yet, and I might toy with the idea of a site logo in place of the brief. That would allow for some branding and a mix of typography and graphics. I could always do both.
I worked up two versions of one logo for this next proof. The dot is the only difference between the two. Tough decision, but I think I will go with the blue dot. I thought I had a good idea by putting an orange glow around it, but in the end , it just looks muddled.
An unintended consequence of the dot–an original part of my signature, is that when combined with the digital elements of the logo, it looks like a satellite planet orbiting the logo. On the future, maybe I will try to make an orange ellipse to signify an orbit. Someday, maybe. Add it to the list.
“A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place”
We will see about that. I hope this works out because it is time to move on. I think I will create title texts in the “Fulvous” (Coolor), and maybe use a library card catalog typography, like Courier or something
By the way, this design was accomplished with a combination of Canva and Photoshop. Nothing too complicated, just designing in one, tweaking it in the other, and exporting from both. Should I turn this into a vector image, then I will accomplish that in Illustrator. Add it to the list.
Addendum
After all that, I uploaded the final to see it clipped on the main page, so I measured, remeasured and created a “dummy image” in what I determined to be a 4×3 aspect ratio.
Using a couple of boarders I figured out that the above aspect ratio would not be clipped on the front page, and nor would it be distorted on the posts page. Sheesh, that was a lot of work for something that might have been listed in the theme’s documentation.
Kevin McNulty 