Hi there! I'm Ashton from Something Swanky Desserts & Designs. And I am over-the-moon excited to be speaking about DIY Blog Design at the Build Your Blog Conference in two weeks! Can you believe it's coming up so soon?? Wow!
I want to tell you a little bit about me and my blogging "experience"so that you'll have a better understanding of the perspective I'll be taking when speaking to you at the conference, which is: you don't need need a fancy design degree or expensive software to create a blog design that is beautiful, functional, and completely custom!
Here's the deal: I have absolutely no formal training, education, or experience in web and/or graphic design. None. And, to be completely honest with you, I can't even find my way around Photoshop. It makes
me dizzy. I am completely, 100% self taught.
Still interested?
I've evolved quite a bit as a blogger and as a designer. My site, Something Swanky, was originally meant to be a website for my home-based cupcake catering business. But as I began to network and get to know other bloggers, I became completely engrossed in the blogging community and wanted to be more involved. So I broadened my blog to include all dessert recipes. It wasn't long before I stopped catering all together in order to focus 100% on blogging. As I searched for ways to drive up my traffic, I realized my blog was seriously lacking something really, crucially important: a good design.
I hired a designer. And she did a wonderful job creating a very cute look for my blog. But within a week of making that purchase, I found myself itching to move things around again, and to adjust this element or that. I knew I couldn't afford to hire a designer every time I wanted a change. As my husband and I live on a pretty modest
still-in-school income, I couldn't afford to buy some fancy illustrating program to create my own graphics either (even if I had known what I was doing)!
So I began to dig around Google, just doing simple searches for things like, "how to make a blog button?" and "why won't my header center?" and "what's the best way to organize my blog layout?" It didn't take long before I had a pretty decent grasp on how to use HTML in blogger. I could put the different blog elements where I wanted them, and could even manipulate some of them to be a little more custom.
My next big challenge was, how do I make this design LOOK GOOD and look like ME?
PicMonkey is an online photo editing site. Many of their tools are free, but you can sign up for a monthly membership (they'll have a yearly subscription soon too) to access even more of their awesome stuff. Every design I create is done in PicMonkey, and I big, fat, puffy heart them!
Why? Because I don't feel like a moron on their site. Because I can use their tools without needing to learn some special graphics language. It's super user friendly and very intuitive. And once you know one tiny, little technique-- the blog design world is totally at your fingertips!
So what is this magical technique I speak of? I don't exactly have a name for it, but I've heard it called "white washing." White washing is awesome. It's an easy way to create a blank "canvas" for any design. All you need is one white washed image to keep on your desktop, and using the overlays and text features on <a
PicMonkey you can use it for all sorts of designs-- from headers to social media icons!
Here's how you do it:
Step 1: Go to www.picmonkey.com
Step 2: Upload ANY photo. It doesn't matter which photo, just pick one :)
Step 3: Click on "Overlays"; Geometric; select the rectangle shape, and change the color to white.
Step 4: Stretch the rectangle to cover the entire photo, and click on "merge."
(Note: the location of the "merge" button has moved to the top center of the screen since I took this screen shot)
Step 5: Save this photo to your desktop and name it something you'll recognize, like "blank" or "white." Naming it will also ensure that you don't accidentally replace your original photo with a white rectangle!
Now, any time you want to add a new element to your blog, you can open up this "photo" (be sure to re-size it to the specific dimensions needed for your element) and start designing!
Here are a few of the design tutorials on my blog that use this trick as a starting point: