A blog makeover story

 My blog was in desperate need of a makeover. I like design and designing things; I went to school for landscape architecture. I enjoy design projects at home and making my own announcement post cards and holiday cards and artwork. But for the life of me, I am unable to translate this design ability to the web. So, last Thusday, ask I skipped last Thursday's swim practice (I wasn't feeling well), I came across Tiana's website, the Blog Decorator.

Tiana specializes in premade blog templates that can be installed as is or you can buy additional customizations. I liked the idea of a customizable premade template since it provided a good visual and working starting point. Initially, I was drawn to the Dianna template, but the flower graphic didn't really match the subject of my blog. Tiana had many great ideas to customize the graphic for my blog, but she was also completely open to own ideas such as:

• Replacing the leaves of the flowers with numbers; 
• Changing the flower to an explosion of numbers of a scale (or numbers floating on top of fountain of water) - yes, this idea was a little out there. 

In the end I went with the Lauren template with a stylized graph image: wavy, intersecting lines starting high on the left and gradually decreasing and stabilizing to the right (see below - my drawing for Tiana. It's always fun to see an initial concept and the final design) with a new colour palette.

Next, Tiana sent me to Design Seeds to pick out a colour template. This was daunting at first, as I was drawn to every third colour palette or so. Eventually, I managed to get down to the final four colour templates: colour crop, salad hues, vegetable hues, and artichoke hues. From there, Tiana pulled together a colour palette from those final four palettes.

As she worked on the design, I finalized changes to my blog name, tag line and navigation menu; you know, shorten and sharpen and edit.

I shortened my blog name to "Thinking like a thin person" from "Can I learn to be a thin person" because I believe that I do think like a thin person. I decided on a shorter tag line "Changing how I think about food, dieting and weight loss" and it better describes the heart of my blog; because I have changed how I think about all those things.

I was amazed by how quickly Tiana works; once we figured out the customizations and the colour palette, she completed the design work and installed the template on blogger in a work day. A few more hours and she designed matching headers for my twitter, facebook and google plus pages.

So there you have it; the story of my blog makeover. If your blogger profile is in need of a new look, I highly recommend Tiana the Blog Decorator!