DIY graphic design

Look around this blog. I designed it. Well, Blogger designed it in the web sense of course. But the colors, the font choice, the polka dot background? That's all me.

And I can't seem to find the right brown.

I'm obsessed with including brown because in graphic design it's seen as dependable, stable, strong, grounded, and somewhat sophisticated. I'm trying to play you with color, you see. I want a medium-dark wood grain, but that's not an option. So I continuously tweak the brown when I see it on a different monitor and think yuck, no.

Does anyone want to guess how many times I've changed the brown color?

Nobody? This is a boring post, I know, but the answer is numerous. 

For the first maybe year of this blog the edge background was this beautiful blue with pink, yellow, and wood-grain polka dots:

I made it in PowerPoint and I loved it. But then I looked at many many more blogs to get a feel for what professionals do. They mostly had less contrast between the edge background and the text background. The eyes like that. So I changed mine. I still have blue, and hot pink, and brown, but now it's much more tame. More professional. 

But on the way to this look, I did consider some other options, such as:

Dots did have this background for a few months.

Is anyone bored yet? I hope not. 

Let's see how different Dots could look with the current polka dot edge background. Behold:

Everyone loves blue. Here nothing else has changed. I like this, but it's missing brown.

I love all medium and dark greens. And I love this green and orange. But not here. And not with the blue-gray.

Pink and taupe, say nope.

Just no.

What you find when you tinker around with one color knob is that the other knobs need to change. This can be infuriating. Real graphic designers surely have more sophisticated tools to help get it right. So now I'm curious. What do they use? And how do they approach a blank page?

Untrained minds want to know. It will help us procrastinate.

And now that I think about it, this post just may qualify for my Feb. DIY challenge!