Thursday 4 April 2013

Ideas on updating your blog - part 2 and a tutorial x

Hello again and welcome to the second part of how I updated this blog. In part 1 I explained about the course I completed with Jessica Sprague and how I came to decide on the colour scheme and moodboard ideas for the blog design.


The next phase was all about colour and involved us utilising some brilliant colour sampling sites to get our own colours perfectly designed for our blogs. The sites we were pointed to are free and simple to use. On some you can work out your own colour palettes using the colour wheel, on others you are able to pick colours from your own photographs to make a completely personalised colour palette. In the end I actually found a photograph online of three colours books and used the colour picker in Photoshop Elements to choose the colours and then add them to my colour swatches stored in Photoshop. This was so cool because it then enabled me to utilise those exact colours in my header and blog posts when choosing font colours. This is really easy to do once you know where to go to within your template for your blog. I'll show you.

Firstly you need to find the colours you want and open them in Photoshop Elements. So open Photoshop Elements Editor then click file and open. I then chose the picture with the book covers I liked.


Next point your mouse to the paint dropper tool and then click with the paint dropper on the colour you want to pick. The colour will now appear on the left panel as the foreground colour 



Next move over to the right panel and click on Colour swatches. This opens up all the colours in Photoshop. Clcik onto the little square next to the dustbin and you're square of picked colour with appear at the bottom of the swatches. This means it is saved as a colour swatch for your use in Photoshop.


Finally, and for this you need a pen and paper, come back to the foreground colour and click on the square you picked out. This will then open the colour menu for that colour from which you can make colours you want within that colour range. On the righthand side of the window you will see a long list of numbers. Right at the bottom is the final number which is what you need to write down on your paper if you want to use it in your blog. So now we can use our colour in the blog we are designing.


Now come over to your blog, I am using Blogger obviously as I only know what to do here I'm afraid. Come to Blogger and open your design template and click on Customise. This will open up this page...........



Next click on Advanced the following page opens...............


Click on Post title ..............

This opens up the page with colour and font options. If you want to change your font style then you can practise on this page. I eventually chose the handwritten styled ''Homemade apple''. The place to change your font colour is the next box where you a  # sign and a numbers with a colour in the next box. This is where we place the numbers and figures you wrote down when we were in Photoshop. So this is easy, simply delete the number in the box and type in your numbers but make sure you add a  # sign before those numbers/figures. Then your colour should automatically appear in the little box. Magic. Now click on the save button and all your changes are made on your blog. You can see how it looks in the panel below the template design menu.

If you want to change the font/colour on the gadgets on your blog you follow the same process but via the gadget title menu.



And now you should have a beautifully styled colour for your blog post titles and gadget titles. I hope this has helped you learn a little bit more about what you change on blogger and also how Photoshop can aid in your designing adventure. If you have any questions then why don't you send me an email.

5 comments:

  1. I'm having a bit of a post Easter catch up this afternoon; and when I stopped here and looked at the new design and thought - oh, how very lovely! It's beautiful and your tips here I will pass on to a friend who has been asking my advice about setting up her shop blog. Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  2. So much great information Jo. It's a bit over my head, but I appreciate the time you put into it.
    Rinda

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for all the help Jo, enjoying following your blog :D Thanks for your lovely comment on mine! x

    ReplyDelete
  4. Very instructive to see how you've put your pretty new look together and you've clearly put lots of work into it :).

    ReplyDelete
  5. It's kind of you to share your knowledge x

    ReplyDelete

Hello and thank you so much for stopping by. It is always a pleasure to read the comments I receive and to meet new friends. I try and reply to comments on friend's blogs as much as possible. I hope you have enjoyed reading my blog and look forward to seeing you here again soon. Love Jo xxx