I don’t want my blog to look like the typical academic blog; it is not gonna be minimalistic or in white and blue shades as some people might expect. It is important for me that the blog reflects my personality, my style, and what we do at the Digital Media & Design program at ITU. Therefore I have considered ethos (Aristoteles), image and identity before designing the layout.
As I see it, Digital Media & Design is more colorful than many other academic programs. Before designing the blog I put down some keywords describing my impression and opinions of it: Innovation, interaction, fun, theoretical, practical, academic, cool, new, urban, forward, creative.
Then I analyzed my own identity and thought about how I want to show myself as a person (the image). I put down these keywords: Young, designer, music, fashion, casual, creative, developer, sailor, swedish, cool, head phones, colors.
I spent some days thinking about how I could use these keywords and express my personality through the blog design. From the beginning I knew that I wanted to use a picture in the background to get the user’s attention and make a clear statement right away. As you can see in the changelog, I tried out a few different backgrounds.
Here are some more things that inspired me:
I came up with the idea of taking a photo of my desk at home. It is always messy, and my favourite things are laying around on it. So I picked out the things from the desk that matched my keywords the best and arranged them to fit the content of the website.
The things on the desk in the photo are:
My iPod: I never leave home without it.
My sailor head phones: They show that I am into music, and at the same time they show my love for everything nautical.
The drawing, the pencil and the glue stick: These things show creativity.
The badges: Showing the logos of two of my favourite Swedish bands – Broder Daniel and Shout Out Louds.
My sunglasses: Simply because I always wear them. Even in the Winter sometimes.
The two books: One is about fashion, and the other is about web-design. Two great interests of mine.
Overall these things put together in the background picture show what kind of person is behind this blog. To make the rest of the design match the background picture I used Kuler to create a color theme from the picture of my desk. At first I wanted to use both blue and pink for head lines and links, but it seemed to be a little too much. Therefore I decided to only use pink. It makes the links and head lines stand out from all the white text.
I have chosen to use a box with opacity for the content of the website, because I still want the background to show even though I post a lot of things. Each post is put in a box without opacity to improve readability.
