I’m going to be honest: deciding how to change the header, the background, and the overall look of the blog wasn’t easy. Actually, the new header is the second one I made. The first one, well, I felt like it was too along the same sort of vein as the old look of Our Thoughts Precisely—i.e. a similar, if not identical color scheme and style. It took me a long time to make it, and I struggled with parts of it because I wasn’t totally happy with it. While, in hindsight, I later realized that I wanted something with cleaner lines, limited colors, and no solid background except for white. But, I also wanted to incorporate all the things that I associate with this blog—birdcages, teacups, skeleton keys, and birds. And the first redesign just didn’t fit that vision. So, I started over again and let me tell you, that was the best decision because I found it so much easier to just sit down and create the header.
About the new header…
The last couple of headers for the blog were pieces I drew on my computer, but recently I got a new Samsung Tablet that I now use for art. There’s one particular app that I use: MediBang Paint. This app is probably the best drawing app I’ve ever used (Adri and I plan to talk more about this app on a later post), and the standard brushes made it so easy to draw the design for this header. The one I specifically used to make the uncolored layer is the Rotation Symmetry Pen with these specific settings: opacity of 93%; width of 1px; 12 lines; color is black; and with “pen pressure size” and “opacity by pressure” checked (pictured below, click to enlarge). The Rotation Symmetry Pen is amazing. It’s my new favorite pen, because it makes patterns and backgrounds so much easier to draw.
Other changes…
Before I end this post, I want to talk about some of the other changes that I’m going to steadily incorporate onto the blog. I won’t stop writing reviews, participating in weekly memes, or writing about book related things—like book tags, lists, etc. However, the main change is that Our Thoughts Precisely isn’t going to be limited to just nonfiction, young adult, or middle grade anymore. I plan to do reviews for most of the books I read instead of limiting myself and what I can post to this blog. Other stuff includes just about anything I or my two co-bloggers want to write about. As such, I’ve changed the sort of byline for the header from “book blog” to just “a place for our thoughts”. What it comes down to is change. It’s easy to get comfortable with what I’m currently doing. However, sometimes comfortable is also stagnant, and that's exactly how I started to feel.
So, I think that about covers it. This post got a lot longer than I thought it would be, but once I started to write I figured out pretty quickly that I had a lot to say. I plan to overhaul a lot of the pages as well, and hope to be done with it soon. So, I'm going to spend the rest of the week making changes.
Before I end this post, I want to talk about some of the other changes that I’m going to steadily incorporate onto the blog. I won’t stop writing reviews, participating in weekly memes, or writing about book related things—like book tags, lists, etc. However, the main change is that Our Thoughts Precisely isn’t going to be limited to just nonfiction, young adult, or middle grade anymore. I plan to do reviews for most of the books I read instead of limiting myself and what I can post to this blog. Other stuff includes just about anything I or my two co-bloggers want to write about. As such, I’ve changed the sort of byline for the header from “book blog” to just “a place for our thoughts”. What it comes down to is change. It’s easy to get comfortable with what I’m currently doing. However, sometimes comfortable is also stagnant, and that's exactly how I started to feel.
So, I think that about covers it. This post got a lot longer than I thought it would be, but once I started to write I figured out pretty quickly that I had a lot to say. I plan to overhaul a lot of the pages as well, and hope to be done with it soon. So, I'm going to spend the rest of the week making changes.
