During Chris’s two and a half weeks of Christmas vacation, we spent our time redesigning a few blogs. We had a grand time working together & making the interwebs a tiny bit prettier. I’ll be sharing a finished project each week along with a design tip (or two) for a better blog. Nikki is another girl who I knew before designing for her. We met when she took one of my calligraphy classes a while back & gave me the most adorable bow necklace ever (here's her tutorial). She's creative, sweet, unique & fun (in fact, I can't wait to be her roommate for Alt next weekend!). I wanted her blog to reflect just that. After seeing Nikki's Neon Christmas post, I knew that I wanted to go for a grown-up dayglo theme. I also went for a more untraditional rendering of the pineapple: a circle. I kept the white space, unified graphics & justified the sidebar items. Her blog was so fun to work on! Head over to thesaltypineapple.com to see the design in action & check out all of Nikki's fantastic ideas!

• Design tip #2: BE CONSISTENT! •

It's a great idea to hire a professional designer to work on your branding, but you can make your blog look instantly more professional by just staying consistent in your content (and by doing that you make the designer's job even easier)! Here are some great ways to achieve visual consistency:

• take & use photos of similar quality (avoid photoshop effects)
• take as many photos as possible in natural light
• edit all of your photos to be the same width as your content (it will look nice & your blog will load faster, too)
• justify all of your post text the same way: I prever left justified, but center is fine if you write more poetically
• use bold, italics, ALL CAPS and large text sparingly

See the video below on how to make your images consistent width with your post content (for blogger, but applies for other platforms). What would you add to this list of being visually consistent? For me, that means taking photos in roughly the same place (which has changed every time we've moved) at roughly the same time of day.