With a Flourish

I've mentioned it a few times this summer, but in the void of work that was this summer I had a wonderful friend, Laura, who hired me to redesign her blog. As a French major, she writes her blog in French -- anything from translation tips to information about the internship she did in France a couple years ago. Amusingly, this didn't help me much, because I don't know a lick of French, but thankfully she was there to translate for me when I needed it.

The blog started out with just the Blogger Minima Template. Two columns, black and white text, and that's about it. Laura wanted a more open layout, one that didn't squeeze the text of the blog space into a tiny little area like the template had it. She also wasn't big on the one column of text being the only thing that made it to the bottom.

So, my directions were to un-squeeze the text, to make said text seem not so alone on the bottom portion of the page, and, lastly, to give the blog an Art Nouveau feel. Otherwise I had almost complete freedom.

(For those that don't know, Art Nouveau is a style/time period of art and design in the late 19th, early 20th century. It focused on very organic, flowing forms. It was VERY decorative, and quite frankly, it's my favorite period in art. Read a little more about it on wikipedia -- also, if you know who Alphonse Mucha is, he was one of the more famous artists for the style and period.)

This is the finished result.

I started with the layout, and once I got that fixed up I went onto the Art Nouveau portion. I did research, sketches of that research, and sketches of my own for the background image - and then for the Header. The sketches were vectored (A vector image is one that can be resized without losing quality) as a way to give them a clean, crisp look. But the thing I had the most issues with was the transparency/opacity behind the main portion of the blog itself - the coding was a bit difficult to figure out and find.

I'll be posting again soon to show a bit more of the thought and process that went into the design and graphics of the blog.