I spent a little bit of time tidying up the design redesigning this blog last night. The old design had never completely satisfied me, and I wanted to move toward something a bit prettier. Hopefully this hits the spot.

The design you see is the culmination of me avidly reading a site called PSDTuts, which gives some of the most detailed and inspiring Photoshop tutorials I've ever read. Feeling confident, I went over to SXC and downloaded a couple of stock images and began to play around with them.

I decided to reuse the logo image of the family of stick figures, but I converted them from black to white and gave them a funky rainbow-coloured outline, which I quite like. I then put them in the grassy meadow you see above and added a tree in the background and a tranquil turqouise sky, complete with fluffy clouds.

Widgets

The biggest challenge I came across while building this design was widgetizing the sidebars. The previous design must have been ancient! Anyway, I came across this helpful tutorial that sped up the process of making the sidebar widget compatible.

I probably have a little bit of work still to do to make the CSS a little tidier and maybe need to pay attention to lists and blockquotes - other XHTML elements that I'm leaving to the rendering graces of the individual browser. I may actually release this as my first ever WordPress theme as a result.

Finally, I decided to save a copy of the old blog design for posterity. Here it is.