Break, Part Three: Layout/Design

Let's talk about making things pretty.

First: Color starts to set the emotional mood immediately, even before your brain fully realizes what you're looking at. I was thinking about how I could choose a color, or set of colors, that would complement each other well and set the tone I wanted, when I was struck by an idea. I have to let you know that there is a voice in my head saying "aargh, I cannot believe you are about to air all your dirty website laundry all over the Internet, people are going to think you're such a girl, first freakin' Cosmo and now this, aaarrgh," but do you know who really cares about color schemes? Brides. I've been poking around The Knot, and they have pages of articles about which colors look warm or polished or fun together, how to decide what mood/colors are best for you,, based on your personality, all kinds of things. I've narrowed it down to a few options, and they are so pretty oh my goodness. Which one wins out will probably have to do mostly with how well I think it will show up on old computers. Don't want colors warping too much on someone's old system.

Second: Images are pretty crucial, because nothing turns people off a website like walls of text. I would like to have a few pictures of me on the site, seeing as how it's about me, but at the same time, I a. don't want to overdo it and look like one of those smug writers, and b. want to emphasize the writerly nature of the site, rather than my smiling little face. I'm thinking maybe three or four pics somewhere, pretty small (no giant heads for me, thanks). For the rest, we've been talking a lot in Typography about using text as a design element, since letters make cool shapes. When I was in college, the literary magazine had a cover one year that was made up of lines and fragments from the stories and poems in the issue, and it was mad cool. I might like to have a background with some lines from my writing, and/or use the title of a page as part of the page's design. "Creative Writing" has some interesting curves and angles, especially if you find the right typeface for it. How difficult is it to make a logotype? How can I experiment with size, typeface, and upper- and lowercase letters to create something distinctive? That's what I'm interested in finding out as I play with the visual element of my site.

Some ground rules: No cats. No excessively flowy fonts. Absolutely no glitter anywhere, ever. Nothing that is there solely to show off how clever I can be (there might be clever/silly stories up for fun, but I don't want to throw in gifs or something just to show that I know how). I like clean rectangles and maybe a bit of layering more than scalloped edges or fake shadows or other such nonsense. There's going to be plenty of playfulness, but I want it to look like a creative person's professional site.