Spend enough time obsessing over your rebranding as a distraction from the fact you feel like total and complete crap and eventually, you get somewhere.
I've worked very hard on this. When my head is being particularly bad for more than just a day, I like to have high-concentration high-creativity but very positive and productive-feeling and low-real-stress projects to keep me distracted. Crafting and Etsy businessy stuff in general is great for it. Kakuro and sudoku and crossword and any other puzzles are good, too, unless my brain starts doing its weird misfire thing and then I get frustrated, but at that point in the migraine I get frustrated by most tasks and if I can't stand watching movies I just sleep.
But I discovered the "torn paper" filter on Adobe Photoshop. After fake tearing down my scanned wallpaper (which I already messed with levels-wise to make it pop better) with the lasso tool, I discovered I had to actually apply the torn paper filter (found under "sketch") to a white background surrounding my wallpaper edge. Then I just futzed with it until I liked how it looked.
After a number of solid colors and patterns behind the wallpaper, I realized it should look like it was torn away
from something. Distract brain from pain by going through different ideas and...sky! Yes, sky would be lovely. So I found a public domain image of the sky, messed with it (i.e. stretched out one particular corner that had the exact amount of clouds I wanted and played with the hue and saturation) until I was happy, and VOILA!
Then, the hardest part. Font. Back to
dafont.com. Back through all the script fonts and the stencil fonts and some of the fonts I already have and just like. Try them all on my new background banner. Make sure they're not too long horizontally or too illegible or too pixely or too stupid. Something that feels right. My favorite visually is still too hard to read. It's called "
Fountain Pen Frenzy" and it's got the exact look and feel I want, but I'm afraid if you didn't know what it said, you wouldn't be able to decipher it and that kind of defeats the purpose. Observe:
So that's clearly a no-go. There were a few fonts that have the fabulous real pen-and-ink letter writing look, but it seems they generally have a harder time translating onto anything but a solid white background in their original size without looking weird.
I also really like the
FELL font family in general and kind of like this version, too:
Plus on this one I played with barely hiding the letters behind the wallpaper. Same goes for the version with the highest ranked font from the old version of the banner. I can't decide if I still like it, though...
SO! Redesignmania is nearing its end. I still need to get
my photographer friend over here and actually make a final decision on font (real comment input is wonderfully helpful...I'll stop tormenting you with polls for now, though I may set up a quick final one and beg the
EtsyGreetings Team for votes). And if you read this whole blog post, mazel tov. You are awesome. You totally deserve 20% off your first purchase from
Off the Wall Greetings once it exists, or any purchase from
JillHannah in the meantime, but only if you give me feedback in my comments ;)
Yes, I just emoticonned.
Fin.
Happy Small Business Saturday! Much like card companies declare card-giving holidays, small businesses are claiming the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend's shopping madness as their (our) own. It's a Walmart World, but it's an independent business world, too. So today (and I say Sunday, too, but I'm biased), try to concentrate your shopping on Etsy sellers, "mom and pop" shops, local boutiques, and the kid who offers to shovel your walk for $10.
To encourage you to participate in this day I'm offering special coupon codes to blog readers, Facebook friends/fans, Twitter followers, and JillHannah returning customers. They will be active Saturday and Sunday, November 27 and 28, 2010 only, so buy now. I almost never have sales, so take advantage while you can.
