Blog Facelift

Sis gave me a gift certificate for a new blog banner for Christmas. I finally got around to creating a tagline recently and began compiling different ideas for the graphics. I was pleasantly surprised with one of my mockups, so here it is!

After I installed the banner, The Serene One teased me about my baseball bat style of graphic design. I don't have Photoshop or any type of editing software, so here's how I did it:

- Stumbled across obenson's fabulous Jane Austen photos. Some are from a 2008 Jane Austen festival in Bath and some are from a BBC filming of Persuasion. I love these generous artists that license their work through Creative Commons. Obenson's terms are that other people are free to adapt the art as long as they cite their original work and license their derivative work the same way.

- Cropped the photo in iPhoto and darkened it slightly to allow light-colored text to show up better.

- Wondered what application to use to overlay text. It happens that I just bought iWork for Mac, so I used "Keynote" (the Powerpoint of the Mac). Keynote isn't as bad as Numbers (Mac's Excel) in terms of being vastly different from Microsoft Office. Still, was a bit awkward. I may need to reinstall OpenOffice.

- Managed to get the text overlayed, but how to convert it to .jpg file? Enter the baseball bat: I took a screen shot of it. The text actually looks pretty clean in the screen shot, but there was a little degradation when I uploaded it. Not sure why.

So, there you have it. Someday, I'll have my act together to sort out a real banner, but in the meantime, enjoy!