About the New Logo

The first thing I did when I started to brainstorm for the redesign was to rethink the logo. I figured most of the branding and styling would fall into place much smoother after that. I’m not sure it actually did, but it seemed like a good place to begin.

I was definitely ready for a new logo, the previous one had begun to feel dated, and unoriginal. I wanted something more customized, something that fit my blog’s style and personality a little better.

Out With the Old

In With the New

For my new logo I began sketching on paper, long before I ever opened up a design program. I hashed out a bunch of different ideas before going with Museo for the words ‘My’ and ‘Blog’. The ‘Ink’ portion of the logo is a customized script I created from my drawings. I scanned in my sketch and traced ‘Ink’ with the pen tool in Illustrator. A few more tweaks later, and that’s the new logo you see now.

Typography

One of my main concerns obsessions with the redesign was improving the site’s typography. Site’s like Brian Hoff’s and Elliot Jay Stock’s have always inspired me because of their attention to detail in this crucial area. The aesthetics and readability of a site are so important to me, and most every designer, so being a design-focused blog I really wanted to make some considerable improvements in this area.

Utilizing Typekit

For the headers, I felt that I needed a unique, bold, but simple font. I decided to check into Typekit and look through the awesome new options that are available. Forever limited to web-safe fonts, it was quite liberating to have an exhausting array of choices at my disposal. I eventually selected Ronnia condensed bold.

The sidebar headers are a serif font stack headed by Palatino. Other meticulous decisions were made on spacing, contrasting levels of grays, and the new, more vibrant blue that you see for the links.

Comment Improvements

I also spent a considerable amount of time trying to improve the comments area. After all, you folks and the discussions that you help create, are vital to the health of this blog. I made an effort to improve the styling, and added threaded comments. So you can now directly respond to anyone’s comment.

Having Fun With CSS 3

I’ve spoke often on this blog about how awesome I think the features in CSS 3 are. It rocks that only 17% of my visitors use IE. That gave me plenty of confidence to use styles like rounded corners and box shadows. It’s nice to add a bunch of progressive enhancements knowing that many of you will get to enjoy them.

I didn’t completely ignore my IE users. I added DD Roundies to the corners for most of the divs that needed them, and I did my best to make this site look good in IE 7 & 8. I did run into a few unexpected, frustrating issues, but I suppose those areas will just have to be examples of graceful degradation. As far as IE 6 is concerned, I very consciously did not support it. The joy of running a design-focused blog is that less than 3% of my readers use IE 6. And if sites like YouTube can stop supporting it, then I think MyInkBlog can as well :)

Author Pages

MyInkBlog is far from a 1-man-show. There are a lot of talented authors that drive the content on this blog. I wanted to add more ways to highlight who they are, and what they’ve done. Every author now has an author page with their bio, links, and the articles they’ve written.

Category Navigation & Search

I have future plans to organize the navigation even more efficiently, but for now I’m happy to have the category links in a more prevalent location. I hope that moving the nav to the top of every page helps you find what you are looking for even quicker. In the same breadth of usability I moved the search bar to the header.

Big Ole Footer

I really like the trend of designing big, informative footers on blogs, so I decided to join that club. I figured it was a great place to add some inspiration, twitter updates, friend icons, and site info. The footer was one of the places on the blog that I tried to infuse a little more personality, but I hope that shows throughout the site.

More On the Way

I’ve got a bunch of future plans bouncing around in my head, but if I tried to accomplish everything at once I may never actually launch this redesign. I’ll leave those plans as a teaser for next time. On a side note, this is actually my 3rd version of MyInkBlog, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a screenshot of how terrible the first version looked.

Your Thoughts & Feedback

I’m really looking forward to getting your feedback. Staring at your own design too long makes you blind to the obvious bugs and usability issues that persist. So drop me a comment and give me an honest assessment of what you think. Hopefully I can use your invaluable feedback to improve and refine this design even further.

The end of the year is always a great time to look forward and make resolutions (I have plenty of those), but it’s also a good time to look back and reflect on the year that was. Here is a month by month roundup of the 2009 highlights for MIB.

Some 2009 Statistics

• Top Post of the Year (193,704 Views) – 10 Awesome Free Handwritten Fonts
• 2,100,000 Views
• 110 Posts
• 8,200 Subscribers

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

They asked me to recreate a tutorial that I first showcased here on MyInkBlog entitled, Create Photoshop Brushes for Coffee Stains and Splatters. The tutorial teaches users how to create coffee stain and splatter brushes from scratch using Photoshop and Illustrator.

The Spread

Here are some photos of the magazine my tutorial appeared in (the front cover, and the article itself).

More Shameless Self Promotion

As long as I’m on the self promotion bandwagon, here are some other ways you can stay connected…

• Twitter
• RSS Feed
• RSS by Email
• Flickr

Other News

I also wanted to remind everyone that we have teamed up with CodeSublime to offer an awesome contest giveaway of a free PSD to Wordpress conversion. We are still looking for submissions, so obviously your chances to win are looking awfully good right now. Check out the post details and submit your design for a chance to win.

I’m so thankful for the sponsors here on MyInkBlog! Without their support it would be financially impossible to keep things running. But they serve as more than just a support system for blogs like mine. They also provide very useful services for readers just like you. I thought I should take the time to thank them, and let you know a little about what they offer.

A Little About our Sponsors

Some of you may have noticed that MyInkBlog was down the last couple of days. Unfortunately, when I switched hosts from StartLogic to the awesome guys at Eleven2 I wasn’t able to transfer the domain name as well. So when I canceled my StartLogic account I had no way of knowing that my domain name was about to expire.

I really don’t have anyone to blame but myself. The moral of the story is to pay close attention to your domain renewal. It cost me two days and $160 to get it out of the redemption period.

Other Site News

With the site being down it did give me the chance to work on my redesign. Which is coming along rather nicely. I’m currently coding the HTML and CSS, I’ll be Wordpressing it soon. I’m hoping to release the new design in 2-4 months (very tentative). I also got a chance to work on the second part of my tutorial on how to Design A Fresh Blog Theme on the 960 Grid. This second part will be released soon, and it will show you how to code your design in HTML and CSS.

The Happy New Family!

On May 9, 2009, my wife and I celebrated the birth of our first child! He decided to come see us a full month early, and was less than an hour away from being my wife’s greatest Mother’s Day gift she’ll ever receive!

No shocker here (especially for those of you with kids), but it will take a little time before I can get back into the full swing of things here on MIB, as I happily transition into fatherhood. However, I anticipate that I’ll continue to blog about once per week, and I hope to have some contributions from a few guest writers along the way.

Happy Birthday MyInkBlog

MyInkBlog has grown up considerably since I started this project/experiment 1 year ago. I honestly couldn’t imagine back then, the direction and success of MIB. I began this blog mainly as a lab to further experiment with Wordpress. However, it has turned out to be so much more informative and rewarding than I had ever anticipated.

The blog now averages about 130,000 views per month and the rss readership has grown to over 4,000 awesome readers. I have gone through two major design iterations and have been making small, incremental changes since then.

I have plans to continue improvements in both the design and function of this blog this year. Stay tuned for a new logo, header and navigation, all of which is getting closer to being finished.

Thanks For A Great First Year!

Thank you to all the loyal readers and contributors that have made MyInkBlog very enjoyable and rewardable this past year!

I’m honored to have gotten interviewed by Grant from over at Colorburned this week. His questions cover the gamut from blogging to my workspace. While your over there, make sure to check out Grant’s blog. It continues to grow and impress, as he churns out cool vectors, interviews and tutorials. And if you’d like to learn more about Grant and Colorburned, be sure to check out an interview he did right here on MyInkBlog not so long back.

Site Changes

I’m still in the process of making doodles on scrap paper, so I’m a long way off. But I’m getting excited about the ideas I have for a redesign of MyInkBlog. I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have for how I can improve the blog here. Please feel free to drop me some comments about what you’d like to see changed or added.

Looking for More Contributions

One of the areas I plan to improve with the future redesign is the recognition of the guest authors on this blog. For now I have an “about the author” at the bottom of every post. If you’d like to contribute by writing a guest article or tutorial I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email to info@myinkblog.com. For additional details check out the contribute page.

I just got interviewed by Angie and Robert Bowen over at Arbenting. I’m stoked they asked me, it was so cool. Hopefully, I came up with some interesting answers :). You can view the interview in it’s entirety here.

Last week, Angie and Robert were kind enough to write a guest post for MyInkBlog. Their entry focused on design trends and creativity. It’s a real enjoyable read and can be viewed here.

The overall growth of MyInkBlog has exceeded any of my early expectations. I am overwhelmed by how robust and helpful the design community is. This is also a really exciting time for me personally, as I’ve accepted a new job as a web developer for Niagara University.

I wanted to use this post to announce some of the upcoming plans for MyInkBlog. Between a contest, some guest posts and a few site changes, things are really quite busy and exciting around here!

My First Contest!

I want to celebrate and thank the 700+ subscribers by running my very first design contest. The whole process is still at it’s early stages. However, I am hoping to get some really great sponsors to offer cool prizes.

More announcements will be forthcoming, but here’s the gist of it. The contest will entail designing a big typography poster using a quote as the starting point. Of course, I’m gonna keep the quote a secret for now (I gotta work up a little anticipation :) ), until we get a little closer to launching the contest. Judging by the design work in MyInkBlog Flickr group, the contest should receive some awesome entries.

The subject of big typography in design was covered a little in my “Big Typography Snowboarding Poster” tutorial and some of the posters shown in my “Creative and Unique Poster Designs” post.

Here Are Some Other Links To Get You Thinking

• Typography is Sexy: Part 1
• Typography is Sexy: Part 2
• Sexy, Bold and Experimental Typography
• Awesome Artistic Inspiration from Music Magazine Adverts
• Typography + Design Inspiration from Music Magazine Ads – Part 2
• Breathtaking Typographic Posters
• The Showcase of Big Typography

Hooray for Guest Posts!

I realize I sound a bit like a broken record, but the design community is filled with amazingly helpful and kind people. I’m going to be taking a much needed vacation from September 13th through September 20th. So I asked some of these remarkable people to lend a hand and within moments I had 4 guest post authors. Here’s the lineup thus far:

Adelle Charles – Fuel Your Creativity

Adelle’s blog is a constant source of inspiration! She is extremely active in the design community, and has been a huge help to me as I’ve gotten started. I’m really looking forward to seeing what she comes up with!

Liam McKay – Function

Liam is one of the most gifted designers in the community. His newest Wordpress theme, Papercut is flat-out awesome. Liam’s perspectives are always fresh and unique.

Brian Lovin – Elite By Design

Brian puts together some of the best articles and roundups within the design community. Brian has a great feel for design and will add his brilliant perspective.

Angie Bowen – Arbent

Angie is super helpful and responsive. Her blog is still pretty new, but it’s gaining loyal readers daily. Arbent is a great resource for roundups, inspiration and design related news.

Max Stanworth – Design Shard

Max has burst onto the design community scene with top-notch tutorials, freebies and roundups. He is original, talented and helpful; look out for an awesome post!

Site News

I’m always trying to do small things to help the look and functionality of this blog. The main thing I’ve worked on the last couple of days is how the comments are displayed. I’ve alternated row colors to help readability. I’ve also added Gravatars to help identify who the commentors are. I love getting comments, so anything I can do to thank the people who leave them is cool with me.

What Else?

I have plenty of additional plans, but one of the more immediate things I want to do is to add an “About the Author” blurb at the end of each post. Hopefully this will be a decent thank you for the upcoming guest writers. Also, I’m always looking for other contributions, if you’d like to write a guest post or tutorial, I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email to info@myinkblog.com.