Anyway, my dear friend Polele asked me to redesign her blog at Tumblr. Now, I'm really not that well-versed in Tumblr (case in point: my very own Tumblr blog) design-wise and I was actually trying to convince her to switch to Blogger instead but since all of her posts are already in there PLUS she's already comfortable blogging in Tumblr, I just took it as a challenge of sorts (yes okay, I'm kinda pathetic that I had to use that as a motivational tool lol).
She only asked for four things on her blog:
1. The color scheme would be black and white
2. The header would say P.S. (her initials)
3. The font on the header would be cartoon-y/comic-y (ok I really don't know how to categorize that)
4. She'd like a nav bar with the following links: Random, Doodles, Travels, Contact
HEADER
When I first typed "P.S" it seemed too simple for me. I mean I'm all for white space and all that minimalistic vibe but it was waaay to simple. It's just 4 characters...in black.
So while I was damn sure this is the sort of thing she wanted, I kind of wanted to push my boundaries (LOL) and see if there's something else I could work with... and I came up with this.
Polele is a big fan of pandas and a part of me hoped she will pick this one because, well I don't want to sound like a d-bag but... IT'S GENIUS RIGHT? It's a panda (reiterating the fact that SHE IS A BIG FAN OF PANDAS), it displayed the clean minimalistic look I was going for and it's in black and white AAAAND it has the P and S she requested.
Before I had her make a choice between these two headers, I decided to look for more fonts and switch up the first banner I've created. The big bold black letters were kinda off-putting because I had to create a nav bar underneath it, also in (slightly smaller) bold black letters. So hours and hours of browsing through the font catalogue and I finally decided on this one.
And sure enough, she picked the latter one. It was still a really good choice though. Maybe the panda could be her logo then? No? Okay.
NAV BAR
There was no contest in the font I was to choose for her nav bar. The only thing I would say about this is it was so hard to code the damn nav bar, especially in the hover part. It took me 3 days to finally do what I wanted to and I've never been this happy since my birthday last year. Thank the Web Gods for this, I will forever be in debt. *kneels, bows down and murmurs "I am not worthy"*
TEMPLATE
Her existing template was Quixotic and it looked something like this
In turn, I chose The Atlantic because of its simplicity and how the layout was focused on the center which would give way for her photography (the photos are coded in hi-res!). When I've finished coding her nav bar (see above for reference) and I finally presented the finished product to her, she told me that she wanted to have a sidebar for her "about me" and to make the photos smaller. Even though it took me a week or so to fit in another column in a one-column layout and to research the tumblr tag to make the hi-res photos smaller, I must say it really looked better this way.
Recently, she has been blogging about her London trip last year. (side note: I should've been there with her by the way! Darn project deployment!!) She went to the olympics and all that jazz! Do drop by her blog here.
Like what you see? Need a blog/website to be designed/redesigned? Hey guess what? I'm for hire!
